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sugarcoatedstarkey · 1 year

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Tear stained pillow case

Pairings- Drew Starkey x Fem!reader

Summary- reader is in a long distance relationship with Drew and the constant shipping of him with his cast mate (Odessa) and hate get to her.

Warnings- Angst, yelling, swearing, a smidge of domestic abuse, cheating.

A/n: to the anon who requested a sad Drew fic, I’m sorry this isn’t the best. I hope I kind of got what you were looking for but I need to work on my angst! Please send me a message when you read this xxx

“YOU, you can’t keep going on like this?!” You shouted; anger bled through your veins. You felt sick, the bile rising in your throat. “You’ve got to be fucking joking me!”.

The nerve of your boyfriend, he spends months away from home. Spends every waking minute with his co-star Odessa, he kisses his co-star off screen and he’s the one who can’t keep going on?!

“Yes Y/N” Drew begins to argue, you cut him off by throwing his pillow at him. He doesn't even flinch, his face screwed up in anger. “No Drew, I’m not fucking done” you yell, you look crazy.

You look like the crazy jealous girlfriend his fans had painted you out to be, and you had every right to be.

“You don’t get to put this shit on me Drew, YOU KISSED HER!”.

-Previously-

You couldn’t take it anymore; his face was all over your FYP. You were stupid enough to create a TikTok account, scrolling endlessly and searching the tags for your boyfriend Drew.

You knew what you would see, thirst traps and edits of him and his cast mate Odessa. Edits of the sex scenes they had to film, everyone shipping them together. You were trying to make yourself hurt, you sat there reading the comments. Reading the hateful things they said about you, the words cutting you like tiny knives.

Ugly

Not good enough for Drew

She’s not even famous

Fat

You were ugly crying at this point, unsure why you put yourself through the pain day in day out. Drew had told you a handful of times not to go searching for these things, to pretend like the fans didn’t exist.

But how could he expect you to pretend? He was famous and there was no hiding it. He had been away for 3 months now; you had a routine of face timing every night around 6pm, but tonight was different. He had an event. An event with Odessa.

“GOD Y/N! What are you doing?!” You shouted, staring up at the ceiling. You roughly rubbed your face, your mascara smearing under your eyes. The tears didn’t stop falling down your cheeks. “STOP!” You ordered yourself, but it only made it worse.

Hyperventilating at this stage, gripping the blankets under you. Pressing your face into the white pillowcase, you were pathetic. A pathetic mess. You were so glad Drew was 12 hours away, there was no chance he’d walk through the doors and see you right now.

You hated that you were being so jealous, you knew he loved you. He adored you. Whenever someone tries to hint at him and Odessa in interviews, he always mentions you, you’re all over his Instagram.

You had never met Odessa; you never had the opportunity to. You did think that meeting her might make you feel less jealous, seeing how they act together in person and not from stupid TikTok clips that were edited purely to make people think they were together.

Your phone ringing cuts your crying short, you sit up quickly and reached for your phone. Seeing his face flash on the screen had you nervous, your skin clammy and heart racing.

You wiped away as much mascara as possible and dimmed the bedside lamp, pressing answer on the screen. His smile appearing on your screen moments later, he was in dark room with a small yellow overhead light.

“Hi baby” he grinned; you could see the glimmer in his eyes. You wanted to burst out crying again but instead you dig your fingernails in your thigh and gave him a fake smile. “Hey baby” you whispered, worried your voice would be husky from all the screaming and crying.

“Why is it so dark?” He questioned, his eyes darting around the screen as though he was trying to look over your shoulder. You shrugged and moved to lay on your stomach. “Going to bed early” your voice cracked, and you quickly hid it behind a cough, you could see a shift in his face.

“What’s wrong babe?” He questions, his eyebrows crease together. He looks over his phone for a second and mouths ‘hold on’ and his eyes dart back to you on the screen. “Nothing, I’m okay. You need to go babe, we can talk later” you smile, brushing him off, you wanted to go back to your sob fess.

“Your lying” he states, his features have hardened. You know he doesn’t like it when you keep things from him, he likes you to be open about your feelings. But right now, you didn’t have the energy to discuss why you were spending your Saturday night crying in bed at 6pm.

“Babe, we can talk about it when your home” “No, tell me now”

“Drew!” His eyes dart over his phone again and he lets out an exasperated sigh, he runs his hand over his face and squeezes the bridge of him nose.

It’s as though you can see the tension building in his shoulder blades, you so badly wanted to be there to offer him comfort. You wanted to be the one to rub his shoulders and whisper ‘you got this’

“Okay, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you tomorrow”.

He ends the call without an I love you, that just sets you off again and you spend the next 2 hours crying your eyes out until you pass out against his pillow.

—-

When you awaken the next morning, you’ve rolled over onto Drew’s side of the bed. Squeezing his pillow tightly against your body. Breathing in his scent that barely lingered anymore.

“Such a loser” you mumble to yourself; you reach for your phone that’s hidden under the blankets.

No notifications

You let out a defeated sigh and make yourself get ready for the day; you had planned to clean the apartment. Drew would be home in a few days, and you wanted him to come home to some normality.

And that’s exactly how you spent your Sunday, cleaning and staying off your phone. It was much harder to do the latter, you were itching to call Drew.

You usually sent texts back and forth every day, sent a couple of pics and just tried not to go crazy without one another. You had hoped listening to music and keeping you busy would stop the incessant thoughts that were flying around your head.

But you found yourself battling with your thoughts more than listening to the music. By the time nightfall came you had scrubbed every corner of the apartment. You had lit a candle in the living room and taken a seat when your phone lit up, the music travelling through the empty room.

You answer, plastering a smile on your face. He gives you a soft smile, he’s dressed in a green button up. The button up you had brought him for his birthday, you loved that colour oh him.

“Hey babe” you both say at the same time, letting out a chuckle at the two of you being awkward around each other. “How are you?” You ask, eyes flickering around the screen.

You can’t see much from where he is sat, you can hear voices and assume he’s just got back from the poguelandia event. You don’t even realise he hasn’t answered, too focused on who’s voice you can hear so close to the phone.

That’s when you look back at him, he’s not even looking at the phone. He’s looking over it again, mourning something and rolling his eyes.

“Why are you acting strange?”

“I’m not?”

“Okay.. why do you keep looking over the phone?”

“Oh, just watching something”

I’m that moment you knew something was going on, Drew always gave you his undivided attention even when he was mad. You didn’t like this, it made you feel sick again.

You were so sick of feeling unwell and anxious. “I’m going to bed”

Drew nods his head and finally looks at you, you press the end call button. You didn’t want to look at his face, you didn’t want to hear his voice. You wouldn’t be able to handle not hearing I love you back. It was easier this way.

You don’t know why you do it, but you don’t go to bed. Instead, you go searching on tiktok again. And that’s where you see it, the videos from poguelandia.

How close he and Odessa are, the way she dances with him. The whispering, the walking close together. You knew it, you just needed confirmation. He liked her, he didn’t want to be with you anymore and that’s why he’s distancing himself.

The tears don’t come though, your body seems to go into denial. Your stomach still unsettled, and your mouth feels dry but you place your phone on the counter and stare at the wall.

- 2 days dater -

“Hey, babe” you’re aroused from sleep, somebody shaking your arms. You jump, gripping the blankets around your chest. “Oh, it’s you”.

“Don’t seem so happy to see me?”

You don’t answer him, instead you stare at him. He takes a seat at the edge of the bed; he smells like the cologne you had brought him for his birthday.

He showered and is dressed in jeans and an oversized white shirt, hair a little messy since he’s growing it out for a project. “I missed you” Drew smiles, it’s a fake smile. You can tell them apart now.

He moves to give you a kiss, but you press your palm to his shoulder, giving your head a small shake.

You’re not dressed for an argument, so you pull yourself to stand and grab an oversized shirt. Not really sure if it’s one of yours or Drew’s but it really didn’t matter at the time.

“What’s wrong babe?” He questions, pulling himself to stand. He towers over you, making you feel small. The tough exterior you had been working on, crumbling slowly.

“Stop calling me babe... just, tell me the truth Drew”.

You don’t even need to clarify what you’re talking about; he runs a palm down his face. He begins to pace the bedroom floor; you had hoped he would deny it.

“I knew it”.

“It was a kiss” Drew states, your heart breaks. You feel as though you can physically hear the cracking of your heart, the bile rises in your throat and the tears pierce your tear ducts begging to be released.

“W-what?” You whisper, your voice wobbles. Your hands shaking as you move to hold yourself against the desk chair. You needed stability or you’d fall to your knees.

“I kissed Odessa, the night of poguelandia”

Your nails carve deep crescent moons into the wooden chair, your chest rising and falling heavier as you try to calm yourself down.

You can’t let yourself fall apart in front of him, he didn’t deserve to see you crumble.

“What the fuck Drew?” You yell, but your voice cracks and you slam your palm over your mouth to stop the hysterics from starting.

Turning your body so you’re not looking at him as the tears cascade down the apples of your cheeks, biting harshly on the skin of your lip. The familiar metallic taste fill your senses.

“It meant nothing”

“FUCK OFF with it meant nothing, why did you do it then?!”

This just seems to set him off, igniting something inside of him that he’s been holding onto for a long time. He’s stepping towards you and you’re taking steps back.

You’re back meeting the wall as he towers over you once more, making you feel smaller than you were. “Because Y/N, you’ve been acting weird. You’ve been distant and quiet; you’ve been making me feel bad for having a career”.

His voice is low and threatening, his hand hits at the wall behind you. You push on his chest, making him stumble back slightly.

“No Drew, I would NEVER make you feel bad for your career choice. However, I would distance myself so that I wasn’t sitting at home crying over you every night, missing you. Wishing I was with you, do you know how hard it is for me?!” You cry, you poke at his chest with your pointer finger. His larger hand grabbing yours to stop you from doing it.

You fight against him until he drops your hand, and you step away from him, your cheeks burnt red with frustration.

“How hard you’ve got it? What about me Y/N? Why is it always about you? I’m the one having to leave, do you know how hard that is on me?”

You shake your head, of course he was turning this all back around to the two of your issues. Acting as though kissing Odessa was okay, that it was just something he needed to do to forget about the issue at home.

“Don’t, don’t bring up all this. You kissed another woman; this is on you. Yea we have problems, every couple does. Yeah, we all have it hard, doesn’t make it okay for you to kiss your co-star” you shout.

You grab your phone; you don’t know why you want to add fuel to the fire. You’re on tiktok before you can rationalise with your brain, the second you’re on the app. The videos are there waiting.

“You see the shit that I have to deal with, go on, watch it”.

You throw the phone across the bed, his eyes falling to the screen of the iPhone. The video loops over the two of them dancing and whispering at the event, you can see him swallow harshly.

“This is a fan editing videos- “Drew begins to argue, and you let out a grunt of frustration, running your hands through your messy bed head.

“I can’t keep going on like this”

“YOU, you can’t keep going on like this?!” You shouted; anger bled through your veins. You felt sick, the bile rising in your throat. “You’ve got to be fucking joking me!”.

The nerve of your boyfriend, he spends months away from home. Spends every waking minute with his co-star Odessa, he kisses his co-star off screen and he’s the one who can’t keep going on?!

You knew you looked like the crazy jealous girlfriend his fans had painted you out to be, and you had every right to be. Your boyfriend of three years had kissed someone who wasn’t you and it wasn’t for a movie.

“You don’t get to put this shit on me Drew, YOU KISSED HER!” You cry, you can’t stop the tears now. You’re hyperventilating again, pressing the palms of your hands into your eyes.

He’s stepping around the bed and pulling you against his chest, you want to fight against him. You want to tell him to get out of the apartment.

But you also want to beg him to stay, beg him to stop seeing Odessa. Beg him to start fresh with you, move on and be happy.

“This is the end, isn’t it?” He questions, you pull away from him slightly. Mascara pooling in your lower lashes, you probably should have washed that off before you went to bed.

“It has to be” you breath, tears begin to fall from his own eyes. This only makes you hysterical, sobbing into his chest as he holds you tighter. You don’t even want him to let go.

“I’ll always love you Y/N, I’ll always think about you when I walk past a bookstore or see those fancy chocolate donuts in the bakery down town” he whispers, his lips are pressed against your hair. His grip is tight around your body, he doesn’t want to let go either.

“I was lucky enough to love you, I’ll always remember that” You whisper, tears fall harder as you look at one another.

“Oh.. if we are doing the right thing, why does it hurt so much?”

“I don’t know”

His thumb wipes away the tears on your cheek, pressing his forehead to yours. You let him kiss you one last time. His lips are soft, and they feel like they always do, they were made for you.

“I should go... I’m so sorry Y/N, truly so sorry”.

You watch him leave, you wait for the front door to close and that’s when you let yourself fall. Knees meeting the hardwood floor, the draft from under the bedroom door kiss your toes. You let out a gut-wrenching sob, praying he would come back and fight.

Taglist- @novxturient @kookypogue111

Part 2

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best-underrated-anime · 6 months

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Best Underrated Anime Group L Round 1: #L4 vs #L5

#L4: Comedians make comedy

Follows the conversations of five rakugo storyteller girls relating the odd things that happen to them each day. Their comedic and satirical chatting covers all kinds of topics, from pointless observations of everyday life, to politics, manga, and more. Each girl has something new to add to the discussion, and the discourse never ends in the same place it began.

Each of the rakugo girls has their own unique personality, with the energetic but immature Marii Buratei; the seemingly cute Kigurumi Haroukitei; the inherently lucky and carefree Tetora Bouhatei; the calm and violent Gankyou Kuurubiyuutei; and the pessimistic and unstable Kukuru Anrakutei. These girls—and their mysterious friend in a wrestling mask—give their observations to the audience, either backstage at the rakugo theater or in various famous locations around Tokyo.

#L5: Underground boxer loves vampire doctor (BL)

After losing his parents at a young age, Mignon lives as a mechanic by day and a cage fighter by night at an illegal arena. Living a life of exploitation and violence, the only person who gives him any attention is Oh Young-One, the resident doctor at the arena.

Despite accidentally discovering Young-One’s true identity, Mignon continues to love him, and it’s this pure kind of love that lets Young-One slowly open his heart. But when the hellish reality surrounding Mignon starts threatening the stability of Young-One’s life, can these two ever find happiness?

Titles, propagandas, trailers, and poll under the cut!

#L4: Joshiraku

youtube

Propaganda 1:

All the girls have fun personalities, and it puts some light on a form of Japanese traditional storytelling. It’s also the origin of the April 40th meme image.

Propaganda 2:

It’s hilarious! Genuinely one of the funniest comedy anime I’ve seen. The characters are all ridiculous and the bits almost all land perfectly. Mostly. Some of the bits require too much knowledge of Japanese language or culture to make any sense translated, but that’s not too many. My favorite character is Gan. I love the joke where she’s the “glasses girl” and so everyone assumes she’s meek and nerdy, but she’s actually super-violent.

The animation is also really good and gets absolutely ridiculous at points. There’s even a recurring meta joke where one character will complain about how hard the animators are working while being ABSURDLY over-animated. The standard structure of the skits is that the characters will start by having a conversation littered with puns, and then things escalated to a jungle shoot-out or crazy slapstick or a ninja battle or the characters talking politics. You never know, and it’s great.

Trigger Warnings: None.

#L5: Mignon

Propaganda:

Mignon is an independently-made BL aeni (Korean anime). There are only 12 episodes, and each is around 5 minutes long, except for the last one. Watching everything is like watching a short film, and not just because of the length, but also because of its quality.

The story is really short, so I can’t talk much about the plot without spoiling everything. But if you’re already into yaoi manhuas, then I can say that the plot is quite basic. The execution, however, is top-notch. Mignon takes a simple premise and brings out the best in it.

Characters are few but focused. Although there isn’t much time to delve deep into them, we are given enough info to care for them. The voice acting is also lovely. I don’t really watch aeni, and I haven’t watched KDramas in years, so I thought it would take me a while to get used to animated characters speaking in Korean. But surprisingly, after the first episode, it no longer bothered me. The voice actors did a good job in portraying the personalities of each character that I was quickly immersed into the story.

Then, there’s the use of color. The colors are purposeful and contributes to the atmosphere of each scene and also hints at us the significance of the place—loud, vibrant colors for the noisy arena, calm whites in the clinic where Mignon first found solace in Young-One, drab blues and greys in Young-One’s apartment where he’s lived alone for years, etc. And oh, don’t get me started on the scene direction/arrangement. It’s amazing how the creators can make every episode impactful despite having only around 5 minutes for each of them. Episode 10, especially, is a cinematic masterpiece.

Lastly, the music. There’s a lot of 80s synth-pop vibes, and I just love it.

Honestly, even if you don’t end up voting for Mignon, just go ahead and watch it. It only takes about an hour, and you won’t regret it.

Trigger Warnings: Mignon is abused by his coach. Lots of scenes that involve blood, but nothing too gore-y. Episode 10, however, has TOO much blood.

NSFW Warning: There’s an explicit sex scene. The parts are pixelated, but it doesn’t really leave much to the imagination. Also lots of tongue kissing.

If you’re reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.

#flashing #<- tag added for 2nd trailer #anime #aeni #best underrated anime #polls #poll tournament #tournament #anime tournament #animation #animated show #group stage #group stage round 1 #tournament polls #korean anime #group l #joshiraku #mignon #민용

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kingstylesdaily · 2 years

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How Harry Styles Became the World’s Most Wanted Man

The global pop icon makes it all look easy — even when it definitely isn't. opens up about his huge year, his two new films, his fans' relationship with Olivia Wilde, activism, sexuality, therapy, and much more

BY BRITTANY SPANOS

ON A FRIDAY night in New York, Harry Styles put on a show. It wasn’t just any show; it was the first time he performed his third and soon-to-be-biggest album, Harry’s House, in its entirety. The crowd that May night covered Long Island’s UBS Arena in feathers and glitter and tears — a ritualistic skin shedding of sorts whenever Styles comes to town.

Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, “Kiwi”; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single “As It Was,” his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken.

“We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he tells me, two months later. “After One Direction, I didn’t expect to ever experience anything new. I kind of felt like, ‘All right, I’ve seen how crazy it can get.’ And I think there was something about it where I was … not terrified, but I just needed a minute. Because I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that the energy felt insane.”

At 28, Styles has unlocked a new level of stardom for himself. Years ago, he regularly filled stadiums as a member of One Direction, his former boy band. This spring and summer, he’s playing them on his own. “As It Was” has become his hugest song yet, setting streaming records and topping the charts in more than two dozen countries, including 10 weeks straight in the U.S. Because he’s a star with a largely young, female fan base, many have refused to engage with him as much more than a pretty teen idol. (I don’t need to lay out decades of music history to show how wrong of a take that is.) But he can feel the tides change in curious ways. “ ‘As It Was’ is definitely the highest volume of men that I would get stopping me to say something about it,” he notes. “That feels like a weird comment because it’s not like men was the goal. It’s just something I noticed.”

Before his headlining set at Coachella in April, I caught Harry backstage, surrounded by James Corden, Styles’ onstage guest Shania Twain, and his girlfriend, Olivia Wilde. Later, I took in sold-out shows in New York and at London’s Wembley Stadium. The immense love showering Styles was impossible to ignore — you see it in the faces of every fan, whether they’ve been supporting him for “one year, two years, five years, 12 years,” as he says in nearly every end-of-show thank-you speech. Along the way I heard him everywhere, even when I wasn’t trying. “As It Was” played in every cab. “Watermelon Sugar” soundtracked breakfast. “Golden” lurked quietly at a London drugstore. “Late Night Talking” blasted at a Brooklyn bar, leading one man to proclaim, “I like Harry Styles. I can admit it,” like it was a radical act of self-acceptance.

And while he may be everywhere in 2022, Styles is, at the moment, literally right in front of me, sitting in an armchair of a hotel business suite in Hamburg, Germany, on a sweaty June afternoon. After a dip in the Irish Sea this morning, he flew into town and is now enjoying a day off in the middle of his first European tour since 2018.

In person, Styles looks more like your best friend’s cute, sporty older brother than the gender-bending style icon he’s become. He’s left the boas and sequin jumpsuits in the dressing room, opting instead for a blue Adidas track jacket, gym shorts, and Gucci sneakers. His hair, often described as “tousled,” like he’s a renegade prince in a romance novel, is clipped back with a hair claw, a signature day-off accessory.

Styles is a kind of millennial anomaly: He plugs his phone in across the room, never once sneaking a glance for a rogue notification. He maintains eye contact as his thoughts unfurl in his often slow, British drawl. He’s a bit more Zen, even stoic, than he once was; that goofy, class-clown energy he exuded when the world first fell in love with him in One Direction 12 years ago has naturally diminished. But he’s still as affable and charming as ever, remembering details from small talk we had in all the other cities where I had been (professionally) stalking him, and proving earnestly curious about how I was going to spend my time in Hamburg and how magazine deadlines work. (Back in New York, after surprising fans at a Spotify event for his new album, he asked me my thoughts on David Crosby’s most recent album, which he loved.)

“My great uncle lives here,” Styles says of Hamburg. “He married a German lady, so I have a German cousin. They always used to come and visit when I was a kid, and the only word in English [the cousin] knew was ‘lemonade.’ I didn’t know if she actually wanted lemonade or was trying to say ‘Give me some water please!’ ”

Of course it wasn’t meant to take him this long to get back to places like Hamburg, where he’ll play for more than 50,000 fans tomorrow night at Volksparkstadion, a local football stadium. Love on Tour, the name for his current trek, was supposed to launch in the spring of 2020, a few months after Styles released his second album, Fine Line. We all know what happened next.

Styles didn’t get to play live again until last fall, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first Number One hit in Fine Line’s “Watermelon Sugar,” a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realize he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it.

As the pandemic deepened, Styles ended up back in Los Angeles, where he keeps a home, and moved in with three friends. They’d “go for walks, cook dinner, wash the lettuce, all that kind of stuff,” he says, until he decided to use his downtime productively and began writing new material. Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio, Shangri-La, was available, so Styles moved in with longtime producers and co-writers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. “We didn’t really know what we were going in for,” he says. “It just felt like sitting at home doing nothing might feel better if we all move in together and try to make some music.” Before they knew it, they were making Harry’s House, a revelatory statement that happens to be his most radio-friendly album to date. He took inspiration from Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 LP, Hosono House, which he first heard when he lived in Japan years ago, and treated the songs like they were an internal monologue, traversing a day in his life.

When flying became an option, Styles came home to London. Later, he drove down to Italy in his late stepdad’s car with a friend, listening to the jazz CDs left behind. He visited the Trevi Fountain one day, likely wearing his short-lived pandemic mustache, and was greeted with just four other people instead of the usual throngs that surround the historic site: “I felt like every day you’d say, ‘Weird time, isn’t it?’ Then go, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking insane!’ ”

He credits his stream of roommates — friends, collaborators — with keeping him together during this time. “I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he says, mirroring the “Harry, you’re no good alone” lyric from “As It Was.” After Italy, Styles visited friends in France, then returned to work, eventually posting up at Real World Studios near Bath, England. By the time he set off across the U.S. to finally tour behind Fine Line last fall, Harry’s House was secretly finished.

Now, besides the unavoidable singles and the victory-lap world tour, there are other indicators of next-level stardom: his skin-care, nail-polish, and clothing line called Pleasing and a fashion collection with Gucci, not to mention his flourishing movie career. He’s starring in the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling and in the intimate drama My Policeman, and he’s nabbed a deal with Marvel Studios to play Eros in at least one of the Eternals films. “Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor,” he says, referring to the singing competition that led directly to One Direction. “Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen.”

But today, in a Hamburg hotel, Styles is still trying to make sense of it all. He thinks hard about love, shame, honesty, and the importance of kindness and therapy. And he worries. He worries about how he can be one of the biggest pop stars in the world, the kind who can be everything for his fans while also being a great son, brother, friend, and partner to the people standing beside him.. As everything gets bigger, Styles imagines a life that is smaller. How does the world’s most wanted man save the best parts for himself?

WHEN STYLES PLAYED two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium in June, the first thing he did after stepping offstage each night was take a shower. The post-show shower has become a ritual: a hygienic necessity, sure, but also a crucial moment of clarity and reflection. He washes away the screams full of love and desire to just be in his presence. Anyone would be overwhelmed by that. “It’s really unnatural to stand in front of that many people and have that experience,” he says. “Washing it off, you’re just a naked person, in your most vulnerable, human form. Just like a naked baby, basically.”

Those post-Wembley showers were especially gratifying. When One Direction, which Styles casually refers to as “the band,” played the stadium in 2014, he ended up with tonsillitis on the day of the show. “I was miserable,” he recalls. “We played the first one, and I remember I came off, got in the car, and just started crying because I was so disappointed.”

Styles’ solo shows at Wembley were a reunion of sorts: He had friends and family from all parts of his life and career in the audience on both nights. His mom, Anne Twist, sister Gemma, friends, and his team all danced in the stands next to Wilde and her two young children. Even former bandmate Niall Horan swung by, smiling through “What Makes You Beautiful.”

As he’s become one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Styles’ need for privacy — for keeping that “naked baby” self out of the public eye — seems to have grown. Secrecy has helped to fend off constant questions about his sex life, the kind that were tossed his way as soon as he was of legal age.

In the past couple of years, he started to go to therapy more routinely. “I committed to doing it once a week,” he explains. “I felt like I exercise every day and take care of my body, so why wouldn’t I do that with my mind?”

Through it, he started to process parts of himself he hadn’t figured out before. “So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analyzing them properly. I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face. Not like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ but more like, ‘What is it that makes me feel this way?’ ”

One feeling he needed to shed was shame, the kind of shame that comes from having your sex life scrutinized while you’re still just trying to make sense of it. Over the years, he learned to stop apologizing for it. He learned he could be vulnerable in private while still protecting it from the public.

Sometimes, though, he worried he was a “hypocrite” for being so closed off. His shows have become empowering safe spaces for his fans, so many of whom want to share who they are with him. Onstage, he’s helped people come out to their parents and facilitated everything from marriage proposals to gender reveals. Separating his personal life from his public one hasn’t been a choice he takes lightly. “When I’m working, I work really hard, and I think I’m really professional,” he says. “Then when I’m not, I’m not. I’d like to think I’m open, and probably quite stubborn, too, and willing to be vulnerable. I can be selfish sometimes, but I’d like to think that I’m a caring person.”

He’s found a vague balance through compartmentalization. “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he explains, perhaps preemptively. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”

Drawing the curtain over his life has only made everyone who’s not behind it more curious. His sexuality, for example, has been a topic of near-obsession for years. He has embraced gender fluidity in his fashion, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before him, and has repeatedly pointed out how backward it feels to require labels and boxes for everyone’s identity. Critics of his approach have accused him of “queerbaiting,” or profiting off queer aesthetics without explicitly claiming the community. Defenders feel it’s unfair to force anyone to label themselves as one thing in order to validate their gender or creative expression.

Styles, without prompting, points out how silly he finds some of the arguments about how he may identify to be: “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone. If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.”

Of late, this can be contested. While he is everywhere, so is Olivia Wilde. The pair met on the set of Don’t Worry Darling, which she directed (more on that in a moment), then made a splash when paparazzi snapped them holding hands at his manager and close friend Jeffrey Azoff’s wedding in January 2021.

Wilde and Styles have said little about the relationship, and rumors have filled the space. Anonymous tweeters acted appalled at their age difference (as if a 28-year-old man dating a 38-year-old woman isn’t completely normal) and criticized the director-actor dating dynamic (as if there isn’t a long history of beloved Hollywood couples meeting the same way).

More intense and jarring was a corner of Styles’ fandom that has made fun of Wilde’s dancing or made lengthy Twitter threads and TikTok videos canceling her for bad or insensitive jokes made a decade ago. If Styles is already held up to a high standard, his potential partners are held to an unreachable one for some of his fans.

Styles is not the most online person — he uses Instagram to look at plants and architecture posts, has never had the TikTok app, and calls Twitter “a shitstorm of people trying to be awful to people” — but he’s still aware of how those small, toxic corners of the internet are treating the people closest to him. “That obviously doesn’t make me feel good,” he says, carefully. It’s a tightrope he’s treading in discussing this. He wants to — and does! — see the good in his fans, but there’s no denying that like every large online community, this one has a faction that runs on hate and anonymity.

Even with the boundaries he’s set between his public and private lives, sometimes “other people blur the lines for you,” he says. There’s a conversation he has to have early in a relationship, no matter how weird or premature it may feel. “Can you imagine,” he says, “going on a second date with someone and being like, ‘OK, there’s this corner of the thing, and they’re going to say this, and it’s going to be really crazy, and they’re going to be really mean, and it’s not real.… But anyway, what do you want to eat?’ ”

While Styles takes comfort in knowing his whole fandom is not like that, he still wonders about how to respond when the noise gets too loud. “It’s obviously a difficult feeling to feel like being close to me means you’re at the ransom of a corner of Twitter or something,” he says. “I just wanted to sing. I didn’t want to get into it if I was going to hurt people like that.”

When asked about her experience with his fans, Wilde is diplomatic. Like Styles, she believes in what they stand for as a collective, calling them “deeply loving people” who have fostered an accepting community. “What I don’t understand about the cruelty you’re referencing is that that kind of toxic negativity is the antithesis of Harry, and everything he puts out there,” she tells me. “I don’t personally believe the hateful energy defines his fan base at all. The majority of them are true champions of kindness.”

STYLES BECAME A leading man when he was four years old, starring in a play called Barney the Church Man. Later, he transformed into Buzz Lightyear in a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang “because Buzz Lightyear was in the toy shop for some reason.” His other early theater credits include: Razamatazz in Bugsy Malone (“the band leader”) and the Elvis-inspired Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (He would later audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, but was deemed too iconic by the director.)

Other than that, acting wasn’t really part of his life plan. He liked it, but he found a new rush when he started performing with his band White Eskimo. When they debuted at — and won — a Battle of the Bands competition, it was the first time he felt “the switch”: his teachers looking up at him, instead of vice versa. “I think I was just a showoff,” he says, with a hint of cheekiness. “I say that like it’s past tense.”

But as Styles was preparing the release of his solo debut in 2017, he took his first foray back into acting, with a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk. (The director said he had no idea how famous Styles was when he cast him.) By the time Marvel recruited him to become Eros, director Chloé Zhao had no one else but Styles in mind for the role. Thanos’ more heroic brother is portrayed in the comics as an intergalactic playboy of sorts, with superhuman strength and the ability to control people’s emotions (a fitting role for the planet’s hottest pop star). MCU boss Kevin Feige recently teased more from Styles, though so far, his only appearance has been the Eternals’ post-credits scene, alongside the Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip. “It’d be funny if that was it, wouldn’t it?” he jokes of his cameo.

Styles’ role in Dunkirk grabbed Wilde’s attention as she was beginning to map out Don’t Worry Darling. He was an early contender for the role of Jack, a charming but secretive husband to Florence Pugh’s increasingly troubled Alice. And Styles had plenty of reasons to be interested in Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde’s second feature film as a director reportedly started a bidding war among 18 studios, following the success of her directorial debut, Booksmart.

Pre-pandemic talks between Styles and the Darling team didn’t make it far; he was, after all, due on a global tour for most of 2020. Instead, Shia LaBeouf won the role, but by the end of that summer, Wilde had reportedly booted the actor for poor on-set behavior.

“I’d wanted to act again,” Styles says. He spent a lot of the pandemic watching movies with his quarantine set of friends and collaborators: He rescreened favorites like the 2012 Belgian drama The Broken Circle Breakdown. Some nights, he and his friends would put a bunch of titles in a hat and choose. (“There was a couple different tastes in the house, so it was between, like, Parasite and Coyote Ugly.”)

Styles was announced as LaBeouf’s replacement a month before filming began. He proved perfect for the role of Jack, who’s brought Alice to the remote, fictional American town of Victory to work on a secret project the men at the company won’t tell their wives about. Jack’s become a star employee and is desperate for his boss’s approval. “We were looking for someone with innate warmth and palpable charm,” Wilde says. “The entire story depended on the audience believing in Jack.”

Styles shot Don’t Worry Darling between September 2020 and February 2021 in L.A. and Palm Springs. Those months were the longest Styles had lived in one place in 11 years. He thought about going completely off the grid while making it: maybe get a flip phone, stop making music. “The reality is you get there on the first day and wait around for 75 percent of it,” he says. “And it’s like, ‘Actually I’m going to text my mate.’ ”

At the start, he was understandably anxious about taking on such a large role alongside stars like Pugh, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, and Nick Kroll. “In music, there’s such an immediate response to what you do. You finish a song and people clap,” he says. “When you’re filming and they say ‘cut,’ there’s maybe part of you that expects everyone to start clapping, [but] they don’t. Everyone, obviously, goes back to doing their jobs, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, was it that bad?’ ” (Being an actor reminded him of session musicians: “You get called in to do your bit, and then someone else puts it all together and makes it.”)

The risk may pay off: He and Pugh are already getting awards-season buzz. Wilde says one moment “left us all in tears” — Jack’s promotion scene during a big company gala. “It’s a strange scene, full of fascist references, and a disturbing amount of male rage,” Wilde says. “The scene called for him to stand onstage with Frank (Chris Pine) and chant their creepy slogan, ‘Who’s world is it? Ours!’ over and over again. Dark as hell. But Harry took it to another level. He was so fully in the moment, he began screaming the lines to the crowd, in this primal roar, that was way more intense than anything we expected from the scene.”

According to Wilde, Pine backed away, understanding this was Harry’s moment. “The camera operator followed him as he paced around the stage like a kind of wild animal,” Wilde remembers. “We were all gobsmacked at the monitor. I think even Harry was surprised by it. Those are the best moments for an actor — when you’re completely outside your body.”

Within weeks, Styles went from the set of Darling to shooting the more intimate My Policeman. He had read the script the year prior, moved by the story enough to have contacted director Michael Grandage and request a meeting. Styles showed up with every line memorized.

Styles plays Tom, a policeman who develops feelings for a museum curator named Patrick (David Dawson). Set in the Fifties, when it was still illegal to be in a same-sex relationship in the U.K., the pair move in secret while Tom pursues a marriage with a schoolteacher named Marion (Emma Corrin). The film shifts between the past and the present, when the three reunite under dire circumstances. “It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,’ ” Styles says. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it.” To him, My Policeman is a very human story. “It’s not like ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

According to Styles, Grandage wanted to highlight what sex is really like between two men in the scenes between Tom and Patrick. “So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” Styles continues. “There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”

Darling and Policeman make their big premieres at prestigious film festivals in Venice and Toronto late this summer, but Styles isn’t sure his pivot to the silver screen will be permanent. “I don’t imagine I’d do a movie for a while,” he says. There are rumors about how many Marvel movies he’s signed on for and other franchises he might be secretly in talks to do. (In response to a rumor he’ll be starring in a future Star Wars series, he says, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’d imagine … false.”)

He doesn’t rule out taking on new roles. “I think there’ll be a time again when I’ll crave it,” he says. “But when you’re making music, something’s happening. It feels really creative, and it feeds stuff. A large part of acting is the doing-nothing, waiting thing. Which if that’s the worst part, then it’s a pretty good job. But I don’t find that section of it to be that fulfilling. I like doing it in the moment, but I don’t think I’ll do it a lot.”

LIKE A TRUE tousled-haired prince, Styles invites me to attend a concert with him by the philharmonic in Hamburg, eight hours before his own show.

On past tours, he says, “I was getting to a lot of cities and feeling like ‘I’ve been here six times and I’ve never seen any of it.’ ” This tour, he’s been taking in a lot of architecture. “It’s something I can do on my own, just sit somewhere and look at stuff,” he says.

Studying the finer points of buildings fits the regimented, disciplined, and distinctly grown-up tour life he’s created. Styles has found himself enamored with routine on the road: 10 hours of sleep a night, IV injections pumping him with nutrients and vitamins, a strict acid-reflux-conscious diet that cuts out coffee, alcohol, and certain foods that affect the throat 50,000 fans are depending on. Last night, he slept with two humidifiers that apparently made it look like he was stepping out of a steam room when he opened his hotel-room door.

The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg — “Elphi” for short — is a striking structure, looking something like a gorgeous sail. Styles is wearing the same outfit as when I met him in the hotel the day before, only with shorts swapped out for pinstripe pants and a surgical mask covering his face. He and I are both late and can’t be let into the show until intermission, so instead we comb through the backstage hallways and elevators to see rooms built for incredible acoustics and sweeping views of Hamburg. He marvels at all of it. In a temperature-controlled room full of pianos, he asks our tour guide which is the best (“Is there a shining star?”) before sitting down at one and playing for a couple of dreamy, Beatlesque minutes. (He’d mentioned earlier that he spent last summer playing piano every day with his morning coffee.) He has questions about paneling. And like a true tourist, he takes pictures of everything.

The first time I ever met Styles was a lot like this. On his first headlining tour, in San Francisco in 2017, I went backstage to interview Kid Harpoon. Styles stumbled into the room where I was waiting, strolling around less like a headliner with fans lined up around the block and more like the lighting guy. Here was someone who is inexplicably difficult to casually enjoy (you watch one video of One Direction’s funniest interview moments on YouTube and suddenly you’re contemplating how many of their cardboard cutouts you can fit in your dorm) acting so casually. He greeted me then like an old friend, not someone who was still refusing to let go of a One Direction keychain at the time. He asked me how I had been, what I was up to in San Francisco, and if I was excited for the show. Of course I remember every second of it.

Styles has a gift for making those in his presence feel seen. Just ask fans who bump into him on walks through Central Park or Hampstead Heath, then detail those moments as if they had met the pope (granted, the pope could never pull off a hair claw).

Before the second half of the concert at the Elphi, the crowd mingles and grabs drinks. As we walk through, Styles goes unnoticed. (The mask helps.) It’s funny to watch one of the world’s biggest pop stars move through space with such ease, as if he’s blissfully unaware of how well-known he is.

“If you make your life about the fact that you can’t go anywhere and everything has to be a big deal, then that’s what your life becomes,” he says. “Now, in London, I walk everywhere. It’s hard to stumble across things and restaurants and places and stuff if you’re just driving everywhere, and it’s just not that fun.”

Styles outlines his upcoming months for me: In August, after he wraps his European tour in Lisbon, he’ll go on vacation with some friends, maybe catch up on the Love Island season he was “gutted” to miss, or see if The Bear is as good as everyone tells him it is. The next leg of his tour includes stops in L.A., New York, Austin, and Chicago as extended residencies, a decision that meets his personal need for a less strenuous touring schedule and a professional need to be able to attend film festivals and rent studios to write and record music for his fourth album. “I’m always writing,” he says. He and his collaborators are already throwing around ideas. “I think all of us are so excited to get back to it, which feels insane because we’ve just put an album out.”

More than ever, he is thinking about the future. He wants to take meaningful time off at some point — from touring at least, he’s always writing — and ensure he’s a more present figure for his family and friends. In turn, he’s learned to define what real love looks like to him. “The fantasy, or the vision, or the version of you that people can build you up to be feels like a person that isn’t flawed,” he explains. “What I value the most from my friends is I feel like I’m constantly reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I think I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes. I think that’s the most loving thing: You can see someone’s imperfections, and it’s not [that you] love them in spite of that, but it’s [that you] love them with that.”

He’s thinking about what it would be like if he had children one day: “Well, if I have kids at some point, I will encourage them to be themselves and be vulnerable and share.”

He’s thinking about what he wants to say, too. Styles admits he was uninterested in politics as a teenager, oblivious to things that didn’t personally affect him. But as he grew more famous, he worried about that, too. “I took a massive look at myself,” he says, “and was like, ‘Oh, I don’t do enough . . . or anything.” When conversations around anti-Blackness and inaction reached a fever pitch in 2020, Styles marched in the streets and read books like How to Be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and The Will to Change, by bell hooks. He started thinking about racial and gender equity, especially as someone who employs many people on the road. “Pretending as a white person you don’t get a head start just isn’t true,” he says.

We were hanging out right after Roe v. Wade had been overturned in America. “I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying it is to be a woman in America at the moment,” he says. He’ll grab a fan’s sign that reads “My Body, My Choice” at the Hamburg show, displaying it proudly onstage. There’s an energy in the crowds that fills him with careful optimism. “I feel lucky to see a group of people, even just on this tour, who come together in a way,” he says. “I think that group of people is so much less afraid of opening the wound, talking about it, and doing the work, than the generation before us.”

As we wait for the philharmonic’s packed show to restart, I notice a few young girls with their families in the audience and ask Styles what he thinks the crossover between this crowd and his show tonight will be. He looks around at the mostly older faces and goes, “Less than one percent … I know I’ll be at both.”

Styles watches the orchestra studiously. When the conductor leaves and then returns to a standing ovation, Styles whispers, “He’s about to play his big hit.” Even when he’s not peacocking in front of 50,000, he’s still trying to entertain the one person he’s with.

We walk out before the crowd fully disperses. Styles lingers a second to take some photos of the room before he heads out to get ready for his concert, where he’ll bounce around the stage, lifted by the wails of young fans who have been waiting years for this moment.

His fans will linger tonight, too, crowding in the hundreds outside Volksparkstadion. They’ll take photos of their outfits, their tear- and sweat-stained glittery faces, the piles of abandoned boa feathers. They’ll play his big hits back to him, holding a phone-light vigil as they sing One Direction’s “Night Changes” or the Fine Line ballad “Falling.” As the city echoes as much of him as it can take, he’ll probably be washing it all away.

#kingstylesdaily #Harry Styles #hs: rolling stone 2022

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Harry Styles: the world’s most wanted man

Harry Styles has become a global pop icon. Now, he has his sights set on Hollywood. How does he make all of it look so easy — even when it definitely isn’t?

On a Friday night in New York, Harry Styles put on a show.

It wasn’t just any show; it was the first time he performed his third and soon-to-be-biggest album, Harry’s House, in its entirety. The crowd that May night covered Long Island’s UBS Arena in feathers and glitter and tears — a ritualistic skin shedding of sorts whenever Styles comes to town.

Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, ‘Kiwi’; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single ‘As It Was’, his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken.

“We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he tells me, two months later. “After One Direction, I didn’t expect to ever experience anything new. I kind of felt like, ‘All right, I’ve seen how crazy it can get.’ And I think there was something about it where I was… not terrified, but I just needed a minute. Because I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that the energy felt insane.”

Before his headlining set at Coachella in April, I caught Harry backstage, surrounded by James Corden, Styles’s onstage guest Shania Twain, and his girlfriend, Olivia Wilde. Later, I took in sold-out shows in New York and at Wembley Stadium. The immense love showering Styles was impossible to ignore — you see it in the faces of every fan, whether they’ve been supporting him for “one year, two years, five years, 12 years”, as he says in nearly every end-of-show thank you speech. Along the way I heard him everywhere, even when I wasn’t trying. ‘As It Was’ played in every cab. ‘Watermelon Sugar’ soundtracked breakfast. ‘Golden’ lurked quietly at a London chemist’s. ‘Late Night Talking’ blasted at a Brooklyn bar, leading one man to proclaim, “I like Harry Styles. I can admit it,” like it was a radical act of self-acceptance.

In person, Styles looks more like your best friend’s cute, sporty older brother than the gender-bending style icon he’s become. He’s left the boas and sequin jumpsuits in the dressing room, opting instead for a blue Adidas track jacket, gym shorts, and Gucci trainers. His hair, often described as “tousled”, like he’s a renegade prince in a romance novel, is clipped back with a hair claw, a signature day-off accessory.

Styles is a kind of millennial anomaly: he plugs his phone in across the room, never once sneaking a glance for a rogue notification. He maintains eye contact as his thoughts unfurl in his often slow drawl. He’s a bit more Zen, even stoic, than he once was; that goofy, class-clown energy he exuded when the world first fell in love with him in One Direction 12 years ago has naturally diminished. But he’s still as affable and charming as ever, remembering details from small talk we had in all the other cities where I had been (professionally) stalking him, and proving earnestly curious about how I was going to spend my time in Hamburg and how magazine deadlines work. (Back in New York, after surprising fans at a Spotify event for his new album, he asked me my thoughts on David Crosby’s most recent album, which he loved.)

“‘As It Was’ is definitely the highest volume of men that I would get stopping me to say something about it”

“My great uncle lives here,” Styles says of Hamburg. “He married a German lady, so I have a German cousin. They always used to come and visit when I was a kid, and the only word in English [the cousin] knew was ‘lemonade’. I didn’t know if she actually wanted lemonade or was trying to say ‘Give me some water, please!’”

Styles didn’t get to play live again until last autumn, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first number one hit in Fine Line’s ‘Watermelon Sugar’, a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realise he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it.

When flying became an option, Styles came home to London. Later, he drove down to Italy in his late stepdad’s car with a friend, listening to the jazz CDs left behind. He visited the Trevi Fountain one day, likely wearing his short-lived pandemic moustache, and was greeted with just four other people instead of the usual throngs that surround the historic site: “I felt like every day you’d say, ‘Weird time, isn’t it?’ Then go, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking insane!’”

He credits his stream of roommates — friends, collaborators — with keeping him together during this time. “I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he says, mirroring the “Harry, you’re no good alone” lyric from ‘As It Was’. After Italy, Styles visited friends in France, then returned to work, eventually posting up at Real World Studios near Bath. By the time he set off across the US to finally tour behind Fine Line last autumn, Harry’s House was secretly finished.

Now, besides the unavoidable singles and the victory-lap world tour, there are other indicators of next-level stardom: his skincare, nail polish and clothing line called Pleasing and a fashion collection with Gucci, not to mention his flourishing movie career. He’s starring in the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling and in the intimate drama My Policeman, and he’s nabbed a deal with Marvel Studios to play Eros in at least one of the Eternals films. “Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor,” he says, referring to the singing competition that led directly to One Direction. “Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen.”

When Styles played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium in June, the first thing he did after stepping offstage each night was take a shower. The post-show shower has become a ritual: a hygienic necessity, sure, but also a crucial moment of clarity and reflection. He washes away the screams full of love and desire to just be in his presence. Anyone would be overwhelmed by that. “It’s really unnatural to stand in front of that many people and have that experience,” he says. “Washing it off, you’re just a naked person, in your most vulnerable, human form. Just like a naked baby, basically.”

Those post-Wembley showers were especially gratifying. When One Direction, which Styles casually refers to as “the band”, played the stadium in 2014, he ended up with tonsillitis on the day of the show. “I was miserable,” he recalls. “We played the first one, and I remember I came off, got in the car, and just started crying because I was so disappointed.”

Styles’s solo shows at Wembley were a reunion of sorts: he had friends and family from all parts of his life and career in the audience on both nights. His mum, Anne Twist, sister Gemma, friends and his team all danced in the stands next to Wilde and her two young children. Even former bandmate Niall Horan swung by, smiling through ‘What Makes You Beautiful’.

As he’s become one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Styles’s need for privacy — for keeping that “naked baby” self out of the public eye — seems to have grown. Secrecy has helped to fend off constant questions about his sex life, the kind that were tossed his way as soon as he was of legal age.

“Everything in my life has felt like a bonus since X-Factor. Get on TV and sing. I never expected and never thought that would happen”

Through it, he started to process parts of himself he hadn’t figured out before. “So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analysing them properly. I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face. Not like, ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ but more like, ‘What is it that makes me feel this way?’”

One feeling he needed to shed was shame, the kind of shame that comes from having your sex life scrutinised while you’re still just trying to make sense of it. Over the years, he learned to stop apologising for it. He learned he could be vulnerable in private while still protecting it from the public.

He’s found a vague balance through compartmentalisation. “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively,” he explains, perhaps preemptively. “There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.”

Drawing the curtain over his life has only made everyone who’s not behind it more curious. His sexuality, for example, has been a topic of near obsession for years. He has embraced gender fluidity in his fashion, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before him, and has repeatedly pointed out how backward it feels to require labels and boxes for everyone’s identity. Critics of his approach have accused him of “queerbaiting” or profiting off queer aesthetics without explicitly claiming the community. Defenders feel it’s unfair to force anyone to label themselves as one thing in order to validate their gender or creative expression.

Wilde and Styles have said little about the relationship, and rumours have filled the space. Anonymous tweeters acted appalled at their age difference (as if a 28-year-old man dating a 38-year-old woman isn’t completely normal) and criticised the director-actor dating dynamic (as if there isn’t a long history of beloved Hollywood couples meeting the same way).

More intense and jarring was a corner of Styles’s fandom that has made fun of Wilde’s dancing or made lengthy Twitter threads and TikTok videos cancelling her for bad or insensitive jokes made a decade ago. If Styles is already held up to a high standard, his potential partners are held to an unreachable one for some of his fans.

Even with the boundaries he’s set between his public and private lives, sometimes “other people blur the lines for you”, he says. There’s a conversation he has to have early in a relationship, no matter how weird or premature it may feel. “Can you imagine,” he says, “going on a second date with someone and being like, ‘OK, there’s this corner of the thing, and they’re going to say this, and it’s going to be really crazy, and they’re going to be really mean, and it’s not real…. But anyway, what do you want to eat?’”

“Everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it”

Styles became a leading man when he was four years old, starring in a play called Barney the Church Man. Later, he transformed into Buzz Lightyear in a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang “because Buzz Lightyear was in the toy shop for some reason”. His other early theatre credits include: Razamatazz in Bugsy Malone (“the band leader”) and the Elvis-inspired Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (He would later audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, but was deemed too iconic by the director.)

But as Styles was preparing the release of his solo debut in 2017, he took his first foray back into acting, with a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s war epic, Dunkirk. (The director said he had no idea how famous Styles was when he cast him.) By the time Marvel recruited him to become Eros, director Chloé Zhao had no one else but Styles in mind for the role. Thanos’s more heroic brother is portrayed in the comics as an intergalactic playboy of sorts, with superhuman strength and the ability to control people’s emotions (a fitting role for the planet’s hottest pop star). MCU boss Kevin Feige recently teased more from Styles, though so far, his only appearance has been the Eternals’ post-credits scene, alongside the Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip. “It’d be funny if that was it, wouldn’t it?” he jokes of his cameo.

Styles’s role in Dunkirk grabbed Wilde’s attention as she was beginning to map out Don’t Worry Darling. He was an early contender for the role of Jack, a charming but secretive husband to Florence Pugh’s increasingly troubled Alice. And Styles had plenty of reasons to be interested in Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde’s second feature film as a director reportedly started a bidding war among 18 studios, following the success of her directorial debut, Booksmart.

“I’d wanted to act again,” Styles says. He spent a lot of the pandemic watching movies with his quarantine set of friends and collaborators: he rescreened favourites like the 2012 Belgian drama The Broken Circle Breakdown. Some nights, he and his friends would put a bunch of titles in a hat and choose. (“There was a couple different tastes in the house, so it was between, like, Parasite and Coyote Ugly.”)

At the start, he was understandably anxious about taking on such a large role alongside stars like Pugh, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan and Nick Kroll. “In music, there’s such an immediate response to what you do. You finish a song and people clap,” he says. “When you’re filming and they say ‘Cut,’ there’s maybe part of you that expects everyone to start clapping, [but] they don’t. Everyone, obviously, goes back to doing their jobs, and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, was it that bad?’” (Being an actor reminded him of session musicians: “You get called in to do your bit, and then someone else puts it all together and makes it.”)

The risk may pay off: he and Pugh are already getting awards season buzz. Wilde says one moment “left us all in tears” — Jack’s promotion scene during a big company gala. “It’s a strange scene, full of fascist references, and a disturbing amount of male rage,” Wilde says. “The scene called for him to stand onstage with Frank (Chris Pine) and chant their creepy slogan, ‘Whose world is it? Ours!’ over and over again. Dark as hell. But Harry took it to another level. He was so fully in the moment, he began screaming the lines to the crowd, in this primal roar, that was way more intense than anything we expected from the scene.”

Styles plays Tom, a policeman who develops feelings for a museum curator named Patrick (David Dawson). Set in the 50s, when it was still illegal to be in a same-sex relationship in the UK, the pair move in secret while Tom pursues a marriage with a schoolteacher named Marion (Emma Corrin). The film shifts between the past and the present, when the three reunite under dire circumstances. “It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal,’” Styles says. “I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it.” To him, My Policeman is a very human story. “It’s not like, ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”

Darling and Policeman make their big premieres at prestigious film festivals in Venice and Toronto late this summer, but Styles isn’t sure his pivot to the silver screen will be permanent. “I don’t imagine I’d do a movie for a while,” he says. There are rumours about how many Marvel movies he’s signed on for and other franchises he might be secretly in talks to do. (In response to a rumour he’ll be starring in a future Star Wars series, he says, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’d imagine… false.”)

Like a true tousled-haired prince, Styles invites me to attend a concert with him by the philharmonic in Hamburg, eight hours before his own show.

On past tours, he says, “I was getting to a lot of cities and feeling like ‘I’ve been here six times and I’ve never seen any of it.’” This tour, he’s been taking in a lot of architecture. “It’s something I can do on my own, just sit somewhere and look at stuff,” he says.

Studying the finer points of buildings fits the regimented, disciplined and distinctly grown-up tour life he’s created. Styles has found himself enamoured with routine on the road: 10 hours of sleep a night, IV injections pumping him with nutrients and vitamins, a strict acid-reflux-conscious diet that cuts out coffee, alcohol and certain foods that affect the throat 50,000 fans are depending on. Last night, he slept with two humidifiers that apparently made it look like he was stepping out of a steam room when he opened his hotel room door.

The Elbphilharmonie Hamburg — “Elphi” for short — is a striking structure, looking something like a gorgeous sail. Styles is wearing the same outfit as when I met him in the hotel the day before, only with shorts swapped out for pinstripe pants and a surgical mask covering his face. He and I are both late and can’t be let into the show until intermission, so instead we comb through the backstage hallways and elevators to see rooms built for incredible acoustics and sweeping views of Hamburg. He marvels at all of it. In a temperature controlled room full of pianos, he asks our tour guide which is the best (“Is there a shining star?”) before sitting down at one and playing for a couple of dreamy, Beatlesque minutes. (He’d mentioned earlier that he spent last summer playing piano every day with his morning coffee.) He has questions about panelling. And like a true tourist, he takes pictures of everything.

Styles outlines his upcoming months for me: in August, after he wraps his European tour in Lisbon, he’ll go on holiday with some friends, maybe catch up on the Love Island season he was “gutted” to miss, or see if The Bear is as good as everyone tells him it is. The next leg of his tour includes stops in LA, New York, Austin and Chicago as extended residencies, a decision that meets his personal need for a less strenuous touring schedule and a professional need to be able to attend film festivals and rent studios to write and record music for his fourth album. “I’m always writing,” he says. He and his collaborators are already throwing around ideas. “I think all of us are so excited to get back to it, which feels insane because we’ve just put an album out.”

“What I value the most from my friends is I’m reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes”

More than ever, he is thinking about the future. He wants to take meaningful time off at some point — from touring at least, he’s always writing — and ensure he’s a more present figure for his family and friends. In turn, he’s learned to define what real love looks like to him. “The fantasy, or the vision, or the version of you that people can build you up to be feels like a person that isn’t flawed,” he explains. “What I value the most from my friends is I feel like I’m constantly reminded that it’s OK to be flawed. I think I’m pretty messy and make mistakes sometimes. I think that’s the most loving thing: you can see someone’s imperfections, and it’s not [that you] love them in spite of that, but it’s [that you] love them with that.”

He’s thinking about what he wants to say, too. Styles admits he was uninterested in politics as a teenager, oblivious to things that didn’t personally affect him. But as he grew more famous, he worried about that, too. “I took a massive look at myself,” he says, “and was like, ‘Oh, I don’t do enough… or anything.” When conversations around anti-Blackness and inaction reached a fever pitch in 2020, Styles marched in the streets and read books like How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and The Will to Change, by bell hooks. He started thinking about racial and gender equity, especially as someone who employs many people on the road. “Pretending as a white person you don’t get a head start just isn’t true,” he says.

His fans will linger tonight, too, crowding in the hundreds outside Volksparkstadion. They’ll take photos of their outfits, their tear- and sweat-stained glittery faces, the piles of abandoned boa feathers. They’ll play his big hits back to him, holding a phone light vigil as they sing One Direction’s ‘Night Changes’ or the Fine Line ballad ‘Falling’. As the city echoes as much of him as it can take, he’ll probably be washing it all away.

#harry styles #harry update #rolling stone #article #august 2022

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rhysdarbyarchive · 2 years

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Rhys Darby Lost(?) Media(??): Trails of Napier

I love how expansive the BNCU (Bill Napier Cinematic Universe) is. Rhys clearly loves this character since he has been incorporating him into his television series, live shows, web videos, and more since (at least) 2006. I want to write a huge post that encompasses as much of this history as possible, but that requires a lot more research and spoons (and DVDs I'm waiting on in the mail) than I can handle right now.

For now, I want to talk about a less-discussed chapter of Bill Napier history: Trails of Napier, the 2010 television pilot featuring Bill.

Trails of Napier was directed by Jonathan Brough (not sure if he worked with Rhys before but he did direct the episode of It's a Date Rhys appeared on in 2014) and produced by Rachel Gardner and MRC Studios (and Dan Schreiber as well? he's credited as co-creator and executive producer on his CV). Here is the description from Jonathan's website:

Fresh from his success as Murray (Band Meeting!) in Flight of the Conchords, Rhys Darby approached me about directing a TV show based on his standup character, gamepark keeper and cryptozoologist Bill Napier. The result was a 12 minute pilot shot in the wilds of New Zealand and Mongolia (that part may not be entirely true), produced by Rachel Gardner and MRC Studios. Watch this space!

The pilot also starred Josh Thomson as Jason and Rachael Blampied as Hayley, roles that they later reprised in the Bill Napier episode of Short Poppies.

I've lost count of the number of interviews from Rhys I've read during this time period where he or the author alluded to a television pilot he was working on, but I'll include two of the more detailed quotes I can find (both from October 2010):

Apparently, he's tipped to replace Steve Carell in the US version of The Office. Darby smirks, but won't be drawn. "Besides the thing you can't ask about, I have created my own show for TV - a cool action adventure comedy show based on the Bill Napier character. There's a bit of adventure in it, a seaplane …'" With his dry, deadpan delivery, it is often hard to tell when Darby is joking and when he's being serious. "I'm always being serious," he says, laughing. "What - you think it's too big, too amazing because I said there's a seaplane in it? Just unbelievable? Surprised we got the budget for that? There's a seaplane in New Zealand, we tracked one down." Compared to a starring role in The Office, it may not sound flashy, but with a wife and two young sons, Darby is keen to stay put in Auckland. "And I can use my own accent there. That's an important thing for me - I don't fancy doing American accents … I want to be myself. And variations of. I don't want to lose the essence of … me," he says. (x)

However, when asked where he’d like to be in a year’s time, he speaks enthusiastically about his own project, based on one of his new stand-up characters, park ranger Bill Napier. "We’ve just shot the pilot," he says proudly. "It’s set in New Zealand, about a ranger who goes around the world on adventures, so it’s a bit of an Indiana Jones kind of thing, but it’s a sitcom. It’s the world’s first action-adventure sitcom." It sounds just about crazy enough to work, and Darby, who would prefer to remain based in New Zealand with his young family, is crossing his fingers. "My dream is for that to come about, to be able to film it here, and to sell it to the Americans – then the whole world can see it.” (x)

Based on this and other interviews, he seemed to want to shoot the show in New Zealand and then pitch it to American networks. But unfortunately it looks like it wasn't picked up by a network.

I'll include two other things that aren't really sourced anywhere else (meaning I don't know how legit they are) but are still interesting to consider in this timeline of Bill Napier-related programming.

Here's a tweet from 2014:

And then in 2017, Rhys did an AMA-type thing on Backstage.com's forum where aspiring screen and voice actors asked questions about getting into the industry. This was in the description about Rhys the website provided:

On the animation side, Rhys is currently producing a pilot presentation for TBS called TRAILS OF NAPIER in which he co-wrote and will voice the lead role of “Bill Napier” alongside Jemaine Clement, Ken Jeong, Linda Cardellini, Glenn Wool and Rich Fulcher.

He was on Wrecked at the same time so presumably that's related to why he was pitching it to TBS.

And here are a couple more stills from the 2010 pilot pulled from Jonathan Brough's website:

Trails of Napier sounded really cool! I love the cryptozoology angle* (I'm curious why this is only mentioned on the director's website and not in interviews, whether that was an omission on Rhys's or the article writers' part), and I love how excited Rhys seemed to be about this project. I would love to see the pilot and the ideas for where Rhys wanted to go with this series. It also makes me really want for him to write a book based on Bill Napier! Either way, I'm glad he was able to use shows like Short Poppies and Alone Rangers to further utilize this character.

*fun fact: there was a prominent Bigfoot researcher named John Napier. This association may or may not have been intentional but I'm still working my way through Cryptid Factor episodes and don't know if Rhys addressed this there. Napier is also just the name of a city in New Zealand, which probably is even less related but still felt related enough to mention

#rhys darby #bill napier #trails of napier #2010s #2010 #2014 #2017 #tv #nz #dan schreiber #jemaine clement #rdlm

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nygleskas · 9 months

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wait is afterparty like a mystery thing? they have clues?? can you tell me more about it (if you wanna) i could be open to getting into something new perhaps and this sounds interesting ! <3

YEA it's a comedy murder mystery show on apple tv!!!! there's 2 seasons out!! they're fairly short too.

each season involves a different murder at an afterparty. s1 is abt xavier (sensation popstar, played by da.ve f.ranco) getting murdered at his afterparty for his high school reunion. s2 which is airing rn is abt edgar (cr.ypt.o titan played by za.ch w.oods who i really enjoy) getting murdered the morning after his wedding! also their deaths aren't spoilers they quite literally happen within the first minute (few more for s2) of the opening lol. there's clues in each ep to denounce a suspect and in s2 there's suspect clues, and also other clues like causes of death that get ruled out! there's morse code, base36, semaphore signals etc.

IGNORE THE BABY WITH XAVIER-MONEY-TIGER😭 just sharing examples of clues they have. ^

each episode is a interrogation of a suspect, and we get to see their mind movies! their mind movies are their alibis through the night told through movie genres!!! here's some examples from both seasons :00

in order: film noir (s2), musical (s1), horror (s1), animation (s1), regency (pride and prejudice! s2), 50s hitchcock thriller (s2), and wes anderson (s2)! there's such a variety. it's crazy how carefully crafted everything is and how each genre perfectly matches the character who's being interrogated so it's not out of place or anything.

i loveee this show sm i'mprobably the biggest fan ever. i've watched s1 14 times, i've made like 12 edits, i have a blog for it, i made [two] [carrds] (spoiler free, the s2 one is a wip tho) dedicated to it, i'm so prevalent in the ap circles that i'm mutual with 3 people (1 cast 2 crew) who worked on the show 😭😭 it even became a special interest bEFORE it came out like i Obsessively checked the wiki every day for a month before even a teaser was out . i'm soo normal abtthis show /s ok jesus this is getting long SORRY . basically this show is great and it has a compelling mystery and s2 is phenomenal so far and everyone should watch it it's so underrated and i'd love to talk abt it w everyone okthANK YOU ANON. For letting me just go ham. apologies for how long this is actually there's one more thing i wanna discuss but i'lll stop for now .

#i got 15 ppl to watch it hopefully this convinces more ...#.msg

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 1 year

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I know I’ve posted links to these pages before, but not for many months, and I’m now using them again and really need to reiterate how awesome this is. Obviously, a podcast like The Bugle is going to have a fanbase full of the type of people who would go through every episode and catalogue the hell out of it. Obviously. Obviously this exists.

Both those links look like the same thing, but they’re different pages. One is a properly organized list of the first 193 episodes, going through each section of most episodes and noting what was discussed, and listing instances of the various running jokes, motifs, features, recurring characters, etc. The other is a disorganized mess that, for each episode up to 146, lists some key phrases and topics. It is so helpful. It looks like a mess at first, but it’s amazingly helpful that if I vaguely remember some joke or other that was made in any of the first 193 episodes, I can CTRL+F for it on that page, and I will probably find it. Not quite 100% of the time, obviously, but this page has come through for me more often than it’s let me down, when I recall some offhand comment Andy Zaltzman made sometime around 2009 but I don’t know its context, and I check this page for it, and there it is. It’s fucking great.

It’s the sort of thing I’d make, but I don’t have to, because it turns out I fit so perfectly into the demographic of Bugle fans (autistic, the word I’m looking for is autistic) that the other ones are just like me and they beat me to it. It was incredibly helpful when I was making Bugle compilations last year, which I maintain were an excellent use of my time, even the one the ended up being the length, and arguably breadth, of a feature film (it’s the one about John Oliver and Sarah Palin, it was supposed to just be a short audio compilation but it’s 74 minutes long and features enough photos and video to count as a documentary).

Aside from how helpful they are, it’s just really entertaining to read the thrown-together lists of “things that happened in this episode” out of context. The properly organized list is great, but the one that’s an unformatted mess has a charm I hugely enjoy, and creates some amusing out-of-context summaries. To grab a few at random:

37 21/7/08 Obama an the media Dr love/The Slaying of Nigel Obama/VP ideas/Europe loves Obama/ Andy describes badgers/Crazy Belgians/Stalin&Rasputin leading best Russian pole/Warmonger cowboy fancy drees/Batgirl is jewish/HFH: Gulveg the Norse giantess

56 15/12/08 Riggles leaving do/lettuce or fairy wings/Blagoiavic corruption/Obamas 1stspeech Old McDonald/Michael stone claims his attack was art/OJ giving birth/Neither Obama or McCain are eligable to be president/Canada in shambles/Plans to cut down smoking/Names for Andys child/British sportsman of the year/Scottish tennis, "Foot fault f*ck you"

109 29/3/10 US healthcare bill a big fucking deal/Death threat on Twitter/Bullet falls through Eric Cantors window/US Israel settlements talk/British MP's cabs for hire/The American on healthcare & National treasure, thinks he's on the radio, guns in Starbucks/Flipping Vanilla Ice the Bird/Roll call of donors

115 17/5/10 Britains Coalition Gov./UK has only 1 more Female MP than Afganistan/Berlusconnis divorce terms/Grecian economy is fucked/Phillies fan tazered

127 20/9/10 Pope in UK/$80 million to keep tigers alive $50 million given/Tea Pary wins midterms/Christine O'Donnel... hates masturbation, is a witch, cross breeding animals/Sport of shinti

131 18/10/10 John beats Riggle at fantasy football, Riggle threatens to kill him/Sporty Pussycat Doll/Bugles 3rd Birthday/Andy is drunk/Chilean miners get out/Someone throws book at Obama

Fucking excellent. Someone scribbled all these notes and put them on the internet so that ten years later I could easily look up in what episode American comedian Rob Riggle threatened to murder John Oliver. Thank you for your service, whoever made this. This is what the internet should be for.

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stormyoceans · 1 year

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[VICE VERSA episode 5 parts 3&4]

“You must only be happy, Talay” UGHUGHUGH

“Only for five minutes” LIAR, YOU WANT HIM TO BE HAPPY ALWAYS

I’d complain about Talay rejecting the hug but again, I think he’s doing it to protect himself

Talay: “I’m cold” Puen: “cool, here’s a drink made of snow”

WAIT IT ONLY TOOK TWO WEEKS TO SHOOT /AND/ MARKET THE FILM?? WHAT THE FUCK???

That poor fucking guy who came back only to lose everything dear to him

Talay’s like “oh god that’s right I swapped with the worst possible person”

“Pakorn might destroy your acting career” Puen: *shrug*

I’m actually surprised Puen didn’t quit being an actor at the end since he didn’t seem particularly attached to the job–plus as his husband Talay wouldn’t get any damn privacy

STOP T-POSING WHILE THE BIKE IS GOING!!!!

That dark suit looks soooo good on Jimmy, holy shit

“She’s my type” Don’t say that in front of your bf Up wtf

Puen is nervous, CUTE

Talay comforting him, CUTE!!!

I’m glad the camera focused on Up and Aou in the theater too since, y’know, it’s /their/ movie and /their/ dream too

Also the movie’s been out for like ten seconds, give it a while

Also Aou is right, what matters is that your art connects to even one person and I’m sure the worst movies out there do

Love that the mall is literally just called “The Mall” adklfdlk

I was alone in a theater for a movie once and it was heavennnnn (it was Jojo Rabbit which did NOT deserve an empty theater)

T&P pick themselves up only for U&A to go “we quit actually”

I don’t really have anything to say about the last five minutes akdfjksdl I’ll leave that to you <3

“You must only be happy, Talay” UGHUGHUGH <<<<< WHEN I TELL YOU IT’S BEEN MONTHS AND THIS LINE STILL HAUNTS ME IN MY SLEEP LIKE I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IS IT ABOUT IT THAT MAKES ME CRAZY BUT IT DOES!!!!!!!! HE WANTS TALAY TO ONLY BE HAPPY!!!!!!!! AND NOT HAVE ANY DISLIKES!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S SO STUPIDLY ROMANTIC TO ME IM THROWING MY WHOLE ASS SELF OUT OF THE WINDOW

I’d complain about Talay rejecting the hug but again, I think he’s doing it to protect himself <<<<< yeah at this point talay is still very unsure about puen’s intentions, so he keeps taking a step back. it’s also why episode 7 is gonna be very important and the fact that people completely overlook it just because it has a lot of product placements it’s gonna be my villain origin story

Talay: “I’m cold” Puen: “cool, here’s a drink made of snow” <<<<< THE WAY PUEN DID THAT JUST TO HAVE THE EXCUSE TO HUG TALAY AGAIN HE’S SUCH A MISCHIEVOUS LITTLE GREMLIN

WAIT IT ONLY TOOK TWO WEEKS TO SHOOT /AND/ MARKET THE FILM?? WHAT THE FUCK??? <<<<< LITERALLY THE BIGGEST MYSTERY IN THE SHOW it throws me off every single time too. i guess maybe it was a short film??? or time also moves differently in the alternate universe????

That poor fucking guy who came back only to lose everything dear to him <<<<< don’t mind me im just killing tess with my mind rn

I’m actually surprised Puen didn’t quit being an actor at the end since he didn’t seem particularly attached to the job–plus as his husband Talay wouldn’t get any damn privacy <<<<< i can’t remember if you watched episode 12 as well…… anyway, just to be safe im not going to spoiler you too much, but they do say that after a while puen starts to work behind the camera as a screenwriter way more than as an actor

STOP T-POSING WHILE THE BIKE IS GOING!!!! <<<<< puen has been such a bad influence for talay SAFETY FIRST KIDS NEVER FORGET THAT

That dark suit looks soooo good on Jimmy, holy shit <<<<< I CANNOT AGREE MORE AND THE TURTLENECK WAS SUCH A GOOD CHOICE TOO

“She’s my type” Don’t say that in front of your bf Up wtf <<<<< SFKDSGFKJSDGFDKJ TRYING NOT TO SAY ANYTHING IS KILLING ME

Talay comforting him, CUTE!!! <<<<< TALAY HOLDING PUEN'S HAND AND TELLING HIM THAT WHATEVER HAPPENS THEY'RE GOING TO GET THROUGH IT TOGETHER!!!!! THE CARE THE TENDERNESS THE DEVOTION THE UNDERSTANDING THE COMFORT THE FRIENDSHIP THE LOVE IM FROTHING AT THE MOUTH

I’m glad the camera focused on Up and Aou in the theater too since, y’know, it’s /their/ movie and /their/ dream too <<<<< people can say anything about this show but it would have been so easy for them to just not bother with the secondary characters since they're gonna remain in the alternate universe and not be part of puen and talay's life anymore instead they took the time to give them depth and screentime and i guess you can add this to the endless list of reasons why i love vice versa

I can’t help but go “pfft” and their deflated reaction to the meh reviews because while I understand you want your movie to succeed, they’re first-time screenwriters, just be glad your movie didn’t bomb and learn from your mistakes <<<<< the movie industry (just like the publishing one) is so hard that i also feel like it was kinda naive of them to expect to be successful on their first try, but i do understand how bad it feels to have something you have worked on and put a lot of effort in be so easily disregarded (especially for up and aou who already experienced their script being rejected before)

Love that the mall is literally just called “The Mall” adklfdlk <<<<< I SWEAR ALL THE DETAILS IN THIS SHOW ARE SO GOOD AND FUNNY

I was alone in a theater for a movie once and it was heavennnnn (it was Jojo Rabbit which did NOT deserve an empty theater) <<<<< HOW DID JOJO RABBIT OF ALL MOVIES GOT AN EMPTY THEATER WHAT THE F--

I don’t really have anything to say about the last five minutes akdfjksdl I’ll leave that to you <3 <<<<< ALL I HAVE TO SAY IS THAT IT’S ONLY EPISODE 5 AND YET PUEN IS READY TO MOVE IN WITH TALAY AND MARRY HIM AND SPEND THE REST OF HIS LIFE WITH HIM MY BOY IS SO GONE LIKE LOVE AND LIGHT TO EVERYONE WHO CAN FEEL NORMAL WHILE WATCHING THIS SHOW BUT THEY HAVE ME OPERATING ON A WHOLE DIFFERENT LEVEL OF REALITY I COULD FIGHT GOD RN

#SORRY BUT THE WAY PUEN JUST GRABS TALAY AND PULLS HIM IN AND ASKS HIM TO MOVE IN WITH HIM MAKES ME WANT TO RUN INTO A WALL AT FULL SPEED #vera and monica watch vice versa #m: ask

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roccan-civilization · 2 months

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METRO is a Cars Spin off on Railroad Trains produced by Disney/pixar, it is considered one of Pixar's or cars most popular and successful movies. The soundtrack of the film features music by KRS One, Raphael Saadiq, Redbone, Stevie Wonder, David Newman, John Powell and Michael Giacchin, as well as an original soundtrack by (Redacted) . Set in New York City and in a Part of New Jersey populated entirely by anthropomorphic cars and other vehicles, it features the voices of Jermaine Fowler as Lead Voice and Liam O'Brien as Fumes, Owen Wilson (Minorly). METRO was also contributed to with the help of YouTuber Francoraptor2018 who made a fanmade Storbyoard back in 2023 before metro was back on production and before people even knew it was starting to be made again.

METRO

Premiere date

April 12, 2024

Genre

Action, Adventure, Drama

Rating

Runtime

2 HR, 2 minutes

Directed by

Steve Loter[1]

Sunil Hall (co-director)

Written by

(Redacted)

Music by

End Credits Song - Cover of Stevie Wonder’s "Living In The City", Sound of Da Police, ETC.

Produced by

Disney

Budget

54 Million USD

Box Office

455 Million USD

Series

← Previous Next →

Planes 2 (Unknown

Plot

The Movie Centers around a New York City MTA Subway train Named Mpaul who in the beginning is in Manhattan as he rides on an overpass as cars are in traffic going about their business and he stops at a Subway station then his doors open as Cars start to get on In Mpaul. Mpaul Heads back to station and as he goes there he goes to a town styled place like for trains as random Train horns honk their horns and after he drops cars off and then he has a talk with some other trains and has a flash back of himself in a Subway station before he headed to Canal street as crazy stuff in the subway station happened. When it was night he looked at the sky and saw 2 stars then he closed his eyes sleeping. he had a dream where he was on a train track but then he opened his eyes and he saw a broken in half rail as he a made a jump landing on the rails as he tried to brake to stop but then he fell off down to ground on a building and heard a pitty talking to him and then he fell again but then he woke up as the trains were talking to him. The POV switches to 3 more trains going about their business then the POV switches to M80/Fumes who’s in trouble with the Police as 2 police officers chase him and as he speeds away from them in a police chase eventually he loses them then when he was done waiting for the police to pass by he sped off onto another street startling some other vehicles. He drives Jumping over a fence into a Crailyard where he spray paints a bunch of MTA Trains. As Mpaul was going down a railroad he saw bright lights of a train so the pitty in the tower switched the tracks but mpaul thought he was dreaming and was about to continue when the train crashed into him dragging and after a short while he was thrown off the rails as A Ambulance and other cars rushed to the scene. He had a dream where he saw his father but the. Woke up when the trains were trying to talk to him. Then later he sets off on the rails and the end.

settings

METRO takes place in New York City and A part of New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan, New York.

Development

Development on Metro began in 2014 by DisneyToon Studios 3 years before Cars 3 and was worked on by Steve Loter and Sunil Hall. Disney also was consulting with MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) Folks and the story for Metro was beginning to made and the script was of a Train MPaul going on adventures throughout New York City and to the pov of a few other trains and a Graffiti Artist M80/Fumes who is in trouble with the police. But the movie was sheleved when disneytoon studios shut down in 2018 but disney revived it. Some Music creators like Krs One, and others also put their music into the movie after it was revived. Also Disney started up again Consulting with MTA Folks. Voice acting up on the characters for the movie.

Animation

When Steve Loter and Sunil Hall and other people were working on METRO again. They added to the characters to have photo-realistic paint, including shine, sparkle, and reflection. things that were added to the Renderman software, which allowed the lighting department to determine the path of the different beams of light and thus have more accurate paint effects. in which time upgrades to Renderman automated most lighting functions.

#disney #disney toons #pixar cars

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dollycas · 7 months

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Purrder, She Wrote: A Detective Whiskers Cat Cozy Mystery by Chris Abernathy #Review @authorchrisabernathy

Purrder, She Wrote: A Detective Whiskers Cat Cozy Mystery Cozy Mystery 4th in Series Setting - Florida Wright on the Mark, LLC (September 12, 2023) Print length ‏ : ‎ ~204 pages Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CBT5V6ZZ

Who would be crazy enough to commit murder while surrounded by dozens of crime mystery writers? The evidence clearly points to one suspect. The problem is, there's no way they could have done it. Our cat detective and the Paradise Cove Mystery Society face an old foe in the fourth installment of the Detective Whiskers Cozy Mystery Series. The stakes have never been higher and the mystery has never been stranger. Dollycas's Thoughts Paradise Cove has another murder on its hands and Detective Whiskers is determined to solve the case. A group of mystery writers have checked into Parrot Eyes Inn for a convention and Evelyn has asked all her friends for help to be sure all her guest's needs are taken care of. Her son Kevin is also at the inn under court supervision following the incidents in book 1, Paw and Order. He confides to Sheila he is in fear for his life. He thinks the man he helped send to prison is out to get him after threats he has received. Sheila agrees to meet with Kevin on her break. But when she goes to meet Kevin she finds him dead, floating in the pool. The evidence confirms Kevin's fears but there is no way the man could have committed the crime. It's time for the Paradise Cove Mystery Society and Detective Whiskers to solve the mystery and cat-ch the killer. This series is so much fun and Detective Whiskers is a purr-fect protagonist. His entourage, Sheila, and her friends are funny with huge hearts and maybe a bit of a drinking problem but together they can be a force to be reckoned with. They want to help Parrot Eyes Inn owner Evelyn in any way they can, especially after her son is killed. Bartending, checking people in and out, cleaning the rooms, making sure the conference rooms are set up properly all while trying to find Kevin's killer. Even fisherman Jimmy gets in on the act by being a handyman fixing things around the inn. These characters continue to evolve so well as the series continues. The animal characters, Detective Whiskers and his friends are cleverly written as well. I really enjoyed the way they looked after each other throughout the story especially when Jimmy was taken away from his usual spot on the pier. Sheila, Tarrie Ann, Becky, and Julia work really hard to follow each clue but it is Detective Whiskers that ruminates and makes sense of them leading to his "a-ha moment". Chief Anderson continues to frustrate me with his jumping to conclusions and then taking all the praise when the ladies and a lovable feline present him with everything on a silver platter. Oh, he got close this time to sharing the limelight, but just couldn't do it. Maybe someday. I really love the way Chris Abernathy tells a story. I know from the minute I sit down and open one of his books I am going to have a few hours of bliss while his characters and their antics entertain me. Purrder, She Wrote is another delightful installment of this lighthearted cozy mystery series. A top-notch mystery with charming animal characters and interesting human ones will give readers a Perfect Escape from their daily woes. You will be smiling and even laughing out loud as you quickly turn the pages trying to solve the mystery. I encourage to to read them all in order for maximum enjoyment.

Your Escape Into A Good Book Travel Agent

About the Author Chris Abernathy has narrated more than 200 audiobooks and now he is writing his own stories. He has been a storyteller his entire life — around campfires at a summer camp as a counselor, on the radio for more than 30 years, as an actor with background roles on major motion pictures and TV series, as a producer of short films for social media and more. Chris is married with two sons and lives on the Gulf Coast in Alabama. He is a dual national with citizenship in the US and UK and visits family in the Scottish Highlands as often as possible. Author Links Webpage – Facebook – Amazon Author Profile – Newsletter Signup Purchase Links –

- Amazon - Kindle Unlimited Too! Coming October 31, 2023

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of this book. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” Read the full article

#ChrisAbernathy #cozymystery #Florida #WrightontheMark

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thejacksmit · 8 months

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Short Takes at LYIFF: The North has a new film festival, and it's awesome

This weekend indie cinema got its rightful moment in the spotlight, as the Lytham International Film Festival took over the iconic Lowther Pavilion. With features, shorts, and curated strands from festival partners - including our old mates at Beyond the Bar programming the 'After Dark' strand - this is a festival rooted in its Northern roots, with a view to going global. So what better way to showcase the best bits than with a return to the Short world of things?

Across the weekend members of the TheJackSmit.com family seen a lot of shorts, and as ever, we're gonna showcase the best ones here on the blog - because you never know how a career might take off from out of nowhere. It was difficult to narrow it down to just a few, but these were the ones which stood out.

JACK'S TOP 3 SHORTS FROM LYIFF

DARWIN'S FOX

SYNOPSIS: Driven by the urge to prove the existence of an extinct creature, a father and his son head off into the wilderness. But soon the search becomes much more personal, when the son suddenly vanishes without a trace.

The Germans like doing the basics right - and this short from Ben Scharf does just that. In half an hour it has the makings of a feature, with some well thought out cinematography and writing. Importantly this short features young talent Cooper Dillon- who will be next seen in Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

MIDNIGHT RIDE

SYNOPSIS: A drug-dealing, Italian delivery rider resorts to robbing a South London burrito joint after his bike and drugs are stolen, little knowing he might be the one taken for a ride all along.

This was a neat short from Alessandro Farratini Pojani (who has shadowed names like Pete Czernin and Graham Broadbent behind the scenes), that has a distinctly British vibe but subverts the idea of a drug dealer trying to get his life back on track... by adding everyone's favourite food delivery service into the mix as he has the unluckiest night of his life. It gets the look and feel pretty much spot on.

A LITTLE GLASS OF RUM

youtube

SYNOPSIS: After grieving over the murder of his wife and son, prison guard Stan Ailor dines with the killer, Kenneth for his last meal. The two converse about the murders which leads Stan to getting the revenge he's been longing for.

LYIFF has its roots in the education sector - so to see Point Park University graduates make a short like this, on a similar kind of budget to UK students is nothing short of extraordinary. Going back in time to the 70s, what Carah Chafin did with writer/director of photography Lauren Keller's script, added in with the authenticity of the locations and those performances.... this is a cracker.

MENDO'S CAROUSEL

youtube

SYNOPSIS: After the death of her father, a troubled woman robs a dry-cleaning shop to make ends meet, but when the owner finds out, a secret from their past forces her to choose between doing what is right or following in the footsteps of her father.

Reading the EPK for this short, this is quite a personal film about honesty for its writer/director David Michael Maurer - and in 12 minutes it tells an incredibly powerful story. It was a worthy way to close the first session of shorts on day 1, and it is definitely making waves on the festival circuit.

As well as the main festival selection, partners Director's Notes brought some of their featured shorts to LYIFF, and as much as we want to talk about things like crazy American dark comedy The Flute, BAFTA nominated short Stuffed and student effort Heart Failure... they are a bit too 18 certificate to be showcased here on the blog. But ultimately the filmmakers enjoyed a Northern welcome, the audiences lapped up each and every film, and the Q&As hosted throughout the weekend (hosted by LYIFF's festival director Ed Greenberg) got a lot of discussion going.

Filmmakers, listen up - you can be part of it next year

The 2024 Lytham International Film Festival is on August 23rd-25th - and applications for next year have just opened on FilmFreeway.

#short take #lyiff

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tilbageidanmark · 9 months

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Movies I watched this Week #135 (Year 3/Week 31):

First watch: The MGM classic Christmas musical Meet me in St. Louis. Delightful all the way, with Judy Garland and the wonderful child actress Margaret O'Brien (Photo Above) as Tootie. 1950's Nostalgia for an idealized middle class world.

🍿

Journey to Italy, my (first?) by Roberto Rossellini. A devastating, compassionate study in a dissolution of a marriage, with a story line reminiscent of James Joyce's melancholic novella 'The dead'. 9/10.

🍿

A second chance, another of the half a dozen Danish collaborations between director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen. And again with the music by Swedish composer Johan Söderqvist, which builds up as much to the mood. A hard story of drug abuse, baby abuse and mental disorders that lead to suicide.

/Female /

🍿

Joyride, the new raunchy Asian-American girlfriends road-trip in China comedy. Gross out and hilarious for the most parts, with some sit-com deliveries and tropes. The Hangover + Bridesmaids, with an all-female crew. 7/10.

Also with 'Palm Springs' "Misty" as a hysterically funny drug smuggler on the train!

/ Female /

🍿

Like Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexican 'Roma', Sebastián Silva's Chilean 'The Maid', and other South American dramas of recent decades, The Second Mother by Brazilian Anna Muylaert tells of a live-in domestic worker who dedicates her life to the well-fare of her affluent employers. Then her daughter who she hadn't seen in 10 years arrives, like 'a magical visitor' and upends the stable household. Power relationship between classes and families. 6/10.

/female/

🍿

The U.S. and the Holocaust, the most recent Ken Burns PBS documentary. Another sober and harrowing 7 hour series, narrated again by Peter Coyote, and featuring Timothy Snyder and Deborah Lipstadt. Another deep dive into America's relationship with race and immigration, genocide, xenophobia, antisemitism and isolationism. 9/10.

🍿

When I was 13, the greatest comic I knew was Louis de Funès. After seeing a lovely clip from Le grand restaurant, I decided to re-visit the comedy, but unfortunately, this clip was the best - and only - funny scene there. 2/10.

🍿

There's diminishing returns with watching too many of Hong Sang-soo's naval-gazing art films. The early (2008) Like you know it all is my 11th, and my least-favorite film by him. Mostly because the protagonist, who stands in for for the director himself, is a young, unpleasant cad, a small-time film director adored by small groups of film students, who floats from one situation to another, and always ends up sleeping with his friends wives. The constant smoking, so much smoking, and getting drunk, doesn't help. 3/10.

🍿

One Cut of the Dead, my 9th 'One shot movie' (*), or as the Japanese director calls it 'One Katto!". A strange independent Zombie comedy, made for $25,000, which ended up making box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget. The first act was actually the only one done without a cut (Like Bi Gun's ‘Long day’s journey into night’!), and the 3rd act was a recreation of that shot, a-la-Truffaut's 'La Nuit américaine'. Funny and inventive. 6/10.

(*) After ‘Rope’, ‘Russian arc’, ‘Lost in London’, ‘Birdman’, ‘1917′, ‘Boiling Point’, 'Victoria' and ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’.

🍿

4 Shorts, two of which were Oscar-nominated in 2016:

🍿 The winner, Sing, is an Hungarian story of a 10-year-old girl in 1990 Budapest, who joins the school choir at her new school. 10/10 - The sweetest film of the week!

🍿 Joe’s violin was a simple, emotional documentary about an old holocaust survivor who donates his 70-year old violin to a school program, where it ends with a 12-year-old Bronx girl.

/ Female /

🍿 ...And Dimensions of dialogue, my second by surrealist Czech crazy man Jan Švankmajer (After 'Alice'). One of Terry Gilliam's best animated movies of all time, a disturbing 1983 claymation nightmare, comprising of 3 short scenarios, including THIS disgusting parable.

🍿 Tender Game, my first independent animation by blacklisted, 3-times Oscar-winners John and Faith Hubley. (He led the Disney's animator strike of 1941 and was denounced by the HUAC). A lovely 1958 short with music by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.

🍿

The Sweet Hereafter, my first by Atom Egoyan. A tragic story full of pains; a bus accident that kills score of kids in a small Canadian town, and tears the community apart, a father who can't help his drug-addicted daughter, another father who sexually abuses his daughter. Also, an ambulance-chasing lawyer as the main character. Too much suffering for me. 5/10.

🍿

2 Judd Apatow productions:

🍿 Honestly, I was bored with the more serious fair, and had to fall back on the old favorite, Superbad. The raunchy humor tries to cover the tender love story between Seth and Evan. The wild and crazy shenanigans by the police duo provided the least authentic action and took away from the core of the story. But it was McLovin's adventures that made the movie what it became. And Emma Stone's Jules.

"These eyes are crying ... for you..."

🍿 Pee-wee's Big Holiday, his 3rd adventure story, was similar to his initial 'Big Adventure' from 30 years earlier, but lighter and less original. His infantile, a-sexual PG-man-child personality, mixed with the 1950's small town innocence, but added to an explicit bromance with the motorbike hunk. With Tom Smykowski as Diner Dan, and one good joke of playing the balloon. 4/10.

"Would you like to say a few words, Pee Wee?...

Mmm sure… Encyclopaedia, pimple and eh, hairball. Amen!"

🍿 Also, a public Service announcement from Steve Martin and Paul Reubens: "Plutonium is the main ingredient in Atom Bombs. Keep it down Behind the counter - away from terrorists".

RIP, Paul Reubens!

🍿

So bad I couldn't finish it: The new, bland 'satire' Corner office. Jon Hamm should have been a mega-star after 'Mad Men', but he's been picking his projects very poorly. Set in an artificial, sterile 'Severance' world, it's a tiring, boring parable of something, but I'm not sure what.

🍿

Throw-back to the "Art project”:

Superbad Adora.

🍿

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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0097linersb · 3 years

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Pink Lemonade

CHAPTER 1

Pairings: Jaemin x Renjun x Haechan x Jeno x Mark x Reader

Genre: Smut, Fluff, Humor (I guess), Slow burn af

Summary: The dreamies decide to spend some weeks at an Inn in the middle of the nature to relax and enjoy some outdoor adventures, far away from their crazy idol life. What they didn’t expect was the nice girl running said Inn.

Word count: 3k

You should read the intro first so this story makes sense <3

☼ previous / next ☼

A/N: Honestly guys this fic will probably be long and detaild af ‘cause I’m using it as a distraction from real life lol guess who just finished their engagement. If u would like it to be more straightforward and go right to the fun parts let me know, I’d really like some opinions! Also, it’s like 2 AM so I’ll proofread it tomorrow

As you woke up the next day, you were not shocked to find that the boys were not up yet. Last night you were surprised to come downstairs to an already fully cleaned kitchen and as much as it made you embarrassed, it also made you immensely grateful. You thanked them and told them to stop being so nice and doing your job for you, to which Mark only responded that seven guys could be really messy sometimes.

You had given them the folders that informed all the activities the Inn (well, you) offered and the ones they could book in the city a few minutes away, it made you smile at how excited they got reading the paper and planning their days. Haechan was already asking if they could go stargazing that same night but the rest of them groaned saying they were way too tired to move after the long trip (and you felt bad once again for having them clean the kitchen).

Everyone eventually agreed on a time for breakfast and you were just sure they wouldn’t wake up that early by the dark circles under their eyes and, turns out you were right. They did go to sleep pretty early the other night, showering after the meal you had and just going straight to bed.

You lazily stretched as you left your room with Koda and Kenai tracing after you, to find a very much awake Jaemin sitting on the living room’s couch holding a cup.

“Good morning, did you make coffee?” You yawned at the boy, scolding Koda so he would get off the couch.

“Good morning. Yeah, sorry for taking the liberty, I really needed to wake up,” He smiled at you, petting your disobedient dog with his free hand so he could get distracted from the way your shirt had ridden up. Damn morning horniness.

“It’s ok, smells good. Are the rest of the boys awake?”

“Nop, and probably won’t be for a while. I know we agreed on going to the lake at 8 but everyone’s dead, I can wake them up if-“

“No, it’s ok,” You laughed. “I imagined this would happen, not a fan of waking up early myself.”

“Oh, you can go back to sleep if you want, I can knock when everyone starts waking up.”

“Don’t worry. You just really made me want some coffee.”

“I left it downstairs, I can go get you a cup.”

“Jaemin, we’re playing opposites here, don’t make me feel useless,” You joked, already making your way to the stairs, missing how the man stared at your legs in your little pajama shorts. “Plus, I need to take the boys on a walk before they become too fidgety.”

“Can I come with?”

“Of course.”

Jaemin was quick to stand up and follow you downstairs, where you quickly poured yourself a cup of coffee and opened the door, the dogs running past you excitedly. You silently lead the way out of your property and into the unpaved road, warming your hands with the coffee mug – The days were hot but the nights and early mornings could be quite chilly, especially with all the trees surrounding you and blocking the sunshine from reaching you.

“Do they sleep with you?” Jaemin asked, pointing at the dogs who were sniffing around the bushes on the side of the road, like they didn’t do this same route every day.

“Sometimes, they often prefer to stay outside, lots of animals to chase when I’m not there to scream at them.”

“They don’t wear leashes?”

“No need to, there’s barely people here and they are really well-behaved. I trained them well, Koda just gets a little bold when we have new guests over,” You smiled, remembering not even 5 minutes ago said dog was trying to get on Jaemin’s lap on the couch. “Do you like tangerines?”

The boy looked at you confused but nodded.

“Wait a second,” You asked before leaving him, walking off the road and into the trees. After a minute or so, you were back, throwing one of the orange fruits at Jaemin. “I steal them from the neighbors sometimes.”

“Will we get in trouble?” He asked but was already peeling the tangerine with his hands.

“Nah, they are never here. These would just rot.”

“Seems only fair then.”

You walked for another few minutes in silence, eating happily as you appreciated the sound of your feet crushing the small rocks on the floor.

“Ok, tangerines do not go well with coffee,” You make a face after eating half of your fruit, only now stopping to pay attention to the actual taste in your mouth.

Jaemin laughs at you before putting his last slice into his mouth, “Cute.”

“There’s nothing cute about this flavor.”

“Didn’t bother me,” He shrugged, smiling down at you.

Damn that boy was too attractive for his own good. You meant, all of them were.

It was just unfair, really.

The two of you talked a bit more until you hit the end of the road and then made your way back, it was a light-hearted comfortable conversation and you liked the way it made you feel warm inside. You learnt that Jaemin likes to photograph stuff and you asked him to take lots of pictures during their stay so you could use them on the Inn’s social media, telling him you shared that hobby with him. You then started a discussion about digital vs. film photography, in which you two clearly didn’t agree on, but it kept you entertained for a long time.

“Listen, technology evolved to this point to make life comfortable and easier for a reason!” Jaemin whined as you two were entering your property once again. “Is there something worse than developing your pictures only to find out your film was ruined?”

“That’s the thrill of it!” You exasperated.

“I call that heartbreak.”

“It’s a raw form of art for the strong hearted,” You sigh dramatically, opening the door for the man.

After your half an hour walk, as you got back home, only Renjun was up, pouring himself some coffee and looking super sleepy.

“Good morning, slept well?” You asked as Jaemin made his way to sit down on the table after getting Renjun to pour him some more coffee.

“Yeah, this is the first time I dreamt in months,” He smiled at you but his eyes were still half closed. Like you, Renjun was still in his pajamas, light sweatpants and a wrinkled white t-shirt.

“Do you guys want to eat something before breakfast?” You asked, not knowing how long they would have to wait for the others.

“It’s ok,” Jaemin answered.

“If you change your mind just let me know,” You smiled, wondering on what to do now, since you had already prepared the food for today last night and didn’t have any other chores until everyone was up so you could make their beds.

You figured the boys would drink their coffees and go talk or lay down in the hammocks, maybe even try to nap a bit but you were proven wrong when Renjun pointed at the end of the table suddenly excited, “Are those cards?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we play?”

“Of course.”

The man was quick to pick up the little box and sit down across the table from Jaemin, who tapped the place next to him before you had the chance to leave. You happily took on the offer, content with finally spending some fun time with people your age. No, scratch that: Attractive men your age.

“Let’s play Rummy!” Renjun suggested, the sleepiness leaving his body at the simple thought.

“I have no idea how to play that,” You informed.

“It’s ok, I’ll teach you. Come closer,” Jaemin smiled at you and you obeyed, heart beating fast at your thighs suddenly touching. What were you? 12?

The game was way too complicated for your morning brain to understand so you basically just watched the boys play, giving your input here and there.

“Jaemin, here!” You excitedly pointed at one of the cards he was holding.

“Oh, I had missed that, smart girl,” He smiled at you, patting your thigh as a thank you or maybe a praise, making your heart almost leave your body through your mouth.

Freaking pet names dude.

After an hour or so playing, Jeno and Haechan appeared already fully clothed and awake. The second boy gave you and Jaemin a weird look, noticing how the boy’s right hand was just casually resting on your thigh. At some point it just happened and it felt comfortable (if you ignored your blood pumping through your body twice the normal speed, of course), it had been months since you had flirted with someone and you were enjoying the touch fully, thoughts of being professional nowhere to be found.

You greeted the boys and they sat down too, informing Mark and Chenle would be down in a second and Jisung would just skip breakfast to sleep. You decided then to get up and leave them to chat as you went into the pantry to organize the food you had prepared yesterday, into the baskets.

“Dude,” Haechan whispered to Jaemin.

Just by looking at the boy, Jaemin already knew what he wanted to comment on so he just, “Don’t.”

“Game on, bro.”

“What? This is not a game, we were just-“

“I said game on, bro.”

Jaemin sighed and gave up, knowing Haechan was just joking and being annoying as usual.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After all the men (minus Jisung) were downstairs and ready to go, you guided them down to the lake, setting up one of those cliché plaid towels for everyone to sit on. As you and Mark organized the foods around, you smiled at the others running around the grass and taking pictures, impressed at the view. The lake really was pretty and your property had a privileged clearing to sit down and enjoy it.

“I would love to say they are normally not this energetic,” Mark smiled at you, placing the bowl with the grapes and strawberries down. “But I’d be lying.”

“It’s refreshing, I rarely deal with people my age around here. We didn’t add bingo to the activities’ folder for no reason.”

“There are no clubs or bars around here?”

“The biggest city around has barely 2.000 habitants so I’ll say no to that. Although this region is becoming really famous for the ecotourism these days, they opened a nice pub for the tourists like last month but there’s only ever people during the weekends.”

“Well, if you ever go to Seoul, let me take you out,” Mark offered before realizing what he had said and stiffening, cheeks going red like the watermelon juice in your hands. “I mean, like, to show you the places and-“

“That sounds fun,” You smiled at him, deciding to end his misery right from the start. He was cute. “Boys, the food is ready.”

Jeno excitedly dropped Haechan down (who he was holding for a picture) and ran over, leaving a very whiny boy on the floor. Jaemin took a picture of that and soon enough, everyone was sitting down on the picnic clot.

“Wow, it looks like we’re in a movie,” Renjun awed, looking around.

It really did, that’s why you liked bringing the guests to this spot on their first day. After everything was set, the scenery resembled a Renaissance painting and you loved it. It was a bit hotter than normally since it was a few hours later then the time the guests usually have breakfast, but the gentle breeze of the wind was enough to not make it unbearable.

The meal was fun, the boys made you feel so comfortable that it felt like you have known each other for a longer time than the actual truth. You all chatted, joked around and posed for pictures with the food. You had brought your analog camera just to tease Jaemin, asking him to take a picture with it for you.

“How do you want it?” The boy groaned, pretending to be annoyed.

“Here, I have an idea,” Haechan shared, excitedly, holding up one of the strawberries from the bowl in front of your face. “Bite it on the side.”

You accepted the advice confused, not understanding where he was trying to go with it but excited, you loved a good old-fashioned improvised picture. Jaemin pointed the camera at you and counted to three, and you smiled around the strawberry when on the count of one, Haechan bit on the other side of the strawberry and looked at you cross-eyed. After you saw the flash of the camera going off, you decided to take a big bite of the strawberry to play around with Haechan but apparently the boy had the same idea and your lips ended up touching, slightly. Since when has your life become a cliché teenage movie?

You quickly took the stem of the fruit from between your mouths, pulling away from the boy to tease him, “Damn. Didn’t even buy me dinner first.”

The others joined in on teasing Haechan but the man simply winked at you, “Would be my pleasure.”

You didn’t even have time to giggle before the other men pretended to puke and Renjun legit slapped Haechan.

_____________________________________________

The boys decided to not do any activities that day because Jisung would simply not wake up and after a while waiting, Chenle decided to join him on the hibernation. It made you feel sad for them, that their days were so busy and tiring that at the first sight of some time off, they would sleep for hours and hours to make up for it.

The rest of you decided to play some volleyball in the parking lot (which was not the best idea considering it was noon). As expected by the almost 40 degrees climate, one by one, every single boy started taking off their shirts, body dripping and glistening with sweat and you just felt in heaven. This could just not be real, you even looked around for cameras, scenes like that just didn’t happen in real life. One hot shirtless guy was the acceptable quota for normality.

But also, you didn’t miss the way they looked at you in your little shorts and top (equal rights after all). It made you feel powerful even though you knew it was just their hormones talking, yours were screaming too after all. If it was already like that on their second day here, you couldn’t imagine how you would survive for the next few weeks, you just wanted to cry every time Jeno (who was on your team) approached you to celebrate when either of you scored, high-fiving you with his huge arms (you would die a happy woman if you were choked by them).

After the game was over, the boys decided to go swim on the lake to cool off and you figured it would be a good time to shower and organize their beds, which you quickly did before starting to make some lunch for everyone. The youngest ones of the group didn’t even wake up to eat so you decided to leave them some food in the microwave in case they got hungry in the afternoon.

Unfortunately the Wi-Fi was being annoying as usual and refused to work, so you couldn’t even google about the boys yet, the curiosity was almost killing you. Maybe it was better like that, right now you were just seeing them as 7 young men living their normal lives and you liked it, it kept you from being nervous at the fact they were probably some big stars that had the world at their feet – They all just seemed so chill sprawled around the living room floor playing the bingo you had joked about earlier, it was hard to believe they probably had hoards of screaming girls around them daily.

They thanked you for cleaning their rooms and told you that you didn’t have to, which technically you did, considering it was literally your job and the whole reason you were there.

You could be wrong, considering you have known them for barely 2 days, but you quickly noticed some little things about them: Like how Jaemin liked to touch you, even if it was just a light brush of his hand on your arm (in his defense, he was touchy with everyone, but when he touched you, it just lingered for a bit longer), or how Haechan liked to playfully flirt with you, that boy just had no shame and you admired him for that. You saw how Renjun often stared at you but when you looked at him, he looked away (which could mean either he was shy or he just didn’t like you very much), but at least he was more subtle about it, as opposite to Mark, who became a blushing mess every time you caught his eyes (and you just wanted to squeeze him). You realized Jeno was a manlier guy, you hadn’t gotten what his deal was yet but you loved the way his eyes disappeared when he smiled and that was enough for you.

It was funny, really, how everyone decided to ignore the tension in the air and go on with the day normally – You did only meet the day before after all.

After getting bored with bingo, the boys told you they planned on going water skiing tomorrow and you agreed happily, telling them you could have a little barbecue party in the camping next to the docks where your parents kept the Inn’s water sports gears, which got them even more excited.

“Can we go camping too?” Jeno asked, receiving a groan from Haechan. Classic city boy.

“Like at night?” You asked and Jeno nodded. “Yeah, actually the stars here are crazy pretty since there’s no light pollution.”

“See?” The boy told Haechan excitedly, who only sighed, accepting his fate.

Barbecue, bonfire, alcohol and a beautiful sky: You were a city girl too but you were also a sucker for a good camping night.

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