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lady-djarin · 8 months

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oh captain, my captain

dbf!joel miller x f!reader (pt. i of ?)

warnings: legal age gap (joel is early 40's reader is late 20's-ish), no outbreak - circa early 2000’s, talk of readers fem body, reader wears a bathing suit, tension, kissing, mentions of smut, teasing, hints of exhabitionism, still kinda explicit, E 18+

a/n: i can’t stop having daydreams about dbf!joel, he haunts me. so i wanna make at least another part but idk how many yet, i like where this is going so i’ll keep y’all updated ;) <3

"That's what you want to wear on the boat?" Sarah scanned the very cute but very thin cover up that was barely hiding your black bathing suit underneath. It was one of many options you were debating to sunbathe on the boat.

You turned around and looked in the mirror at yourself. "Yea why? Does it look weird?" Sarah was your best friend partly because she was so honest, she'd never let you go out looking anything less than 'perfect'. Even if you had very different definitions of perfect.

"No, not weird, but our dads are going to be there." She made a disgusted face like she smelled something rotten.

“Oh please it’s not that bad… my ass is completely covered!”

“Girl… your tits!” She pointed an accusing finger at your chest. It was true, they were ‘out’ but they looked good. The bathing suit made sure of that. “You do you, but if your boob flies out in front of both our dads I’ll be the one laughing.”

You giggled as she went back to flipping through a magazine. The two day boat trip was a summer tradition with your dad, Sarah and her dad, Joel. Joel was also your dads best friend. He was younger than your dad but they had a solid relationship after working together for over 15 years. That’s how you gained Sarah as basically a younger sister as well as best friend. It had been just you and your dad for a long time so it was nice having Joel and Sarah around to do ‘family’ things with. The countless family trips, birthdays and holidays meant you grew up around Joel and as you got older your view of him definitely changed.

Since you matured, so had your taste in men. Your first boyfriend in high school was barely even a boy, he was a small minded child with more interest in his baseball ‘career’ than you. He did lots of things that you now realize are the exact opposite of what you want in someone.

You now find yourself chronically single with a few stories to tell along the way. You also hate to admit that over the last couple of those shared holidays and trips that your eyes had started to linger on a particular man.

A man who you definitely should not be looking at that way. Somehow your brain had latched onto the idea that Joel Miller was the perfect man for you. He was caring and sweet and drop dead gorgeous. He was gorgeous in a rugged way, his brown messy waves and deep amber eyes. His cheeks were always covered in stubble. Stubble you wanted to feel between your thighs.

Only problem is, every time you start to think like that, you're reminded that he’s your dads best friend. You hang out with his daughter. It was wrong on so many levels, which only made you fall deeper.

You had caught yourself looking at him more than you care to admit, and him reciprocating just as much. That’s why you wanted to wear the black bathing suit, you knew he’d look.

—————

The morning of the trip was here and you were starting to get nervous. You were going to be trapped on the same small vessel as your biggest crush and your dad. That would throw anyone off.

You finished packing your bag and headed downstairs to find your dad making coffees for you both. As you swing into the kitchen you see another large form, wide shoulders stretching the canvas jacket. Joel turned around with a mug in one hand and rubbed the top of your head with the other. Your heart almost stopped beating for a second as he pulled you into a side hug.

“Hey kiddo,” his voice rumbled through your body at the contact.

He messed up your hair as you pushed away. “Don’t call me that,” you scowled and pushed down your hair. God, you felt like an idiot.

Your dad handed you a travel mug and you made for the bench by the front door to put your boots on. Before you made it, you felt the weight of your backpack being lifted from your shoulder.

“I got it sweetheart, I’m loading up the car.” You almost thought it was your dad at first but you turned to find those amber eyes next to yours. He squeezed past you in the small hallway, his whole body was practically rubbing against yours as he passed. He never called you anything like sweetheart.

He was gone before you could register and left you to put on your shoes.

You made your way to the driveway and Joel held the car door open for you. You settled into the seat behind the driver and he shut the door after you. Also new. The muffled boom of Joel's voice calling for your dad was the only noise until Sarah hopped in next to you. You were starting to dread the next almost 2 hour drive to the lake, having to sit behind Joel and not go crazy as your eyes connected through the rear view mirror.

—————

The boat they rented this year was a little bigger to your surprise. Your dad always made the overnight trip really special; Joel teaching you guys how to fish, making s'mores on the tiny gas stove and stargazing on the water. This year they really went all out, they got a slightly nicer one with a fancy bathroom and everything.

The whole reason you guys started this tradition was because Joel really liked fishing and knew how to drive a boat. He just rented a different one every year. This year it came with cushy seats, full sized beds and a little seating area on the deck. Most of your morning was spent reading on that deck as Joel and your dad set sail. You were thankful your dark sunglasses covered your lingering gaze that slid over Joel's form. Fuck, how could you not? His shirt was soaked with sweat as he worked the boat, muscles straining as he went about his tasks. You had no idea what he was actually doing, so distracted by his movements.

He seemed to be finished as he wiped his hands on a rag and sat himself next to you, slumping down with a sigh.

“Hey, where’s my kid?” He squinted down at your book. Nosey.

“She’s napping. Complained about waking up early.” You yanked your book away with a frown.

“Geez, that girl.” He put his hand on your knee as he stood up. Your skin was instantly on fire. “I’m gonna make some burgers, want one?”

All you could manage was a nod.

—————

The rest of the afternoon was pretty tame. You guys found a spot on the water you liked and the men started fishing and you and Sarah went to your shared room to change. Once you were ready you went to the small kitchen to grab some lemonade… and maybe add some of that vodka your dad brought. While your dad didn't care that you drank, being of legal age and all, he didn't endorse you letting Sarah drink, since she was a few years younger than you. But what he doesn't know won’t hurt him. Plus you poured Sarah half a shot, she'd be fine.

You two sat out there gossiping and reading books and magazines. You did decide to wear the black suit, the one that made your boobs look great. And boy did it pay off.

Since Joel and your dad were sharing the small deck with you guys, you had a perfect view of him. Even better, he had a perfect one of you. You caught him looking at you more often than not. You were actually kind of surprised that your dad didn't notice, or Sarah. But why question a good thing.

After the sun went down everyone changed and you all stargazed on the deck in the warm summer night until finally heading to bed. You and Sarah were sharing a tiny room and an even smaller bed, and while you never minded before, for some reason you couldn’t find a way to get comfortable. You tried your best to fall asleep, hoping the movement of the water would put you out. Once you saw the small clock glowing ‘2:26am’ you decided to go up and get some water, or maybe just stretch your legs.

You made your way up the narrow staircase into the main area where a small couch sat. The small couch that Joel was sitting on.

“Hey, what are you doin’ up?” He looked like he had been awake for a while too. You didn't know he wore glasses. He looked cute.

Fuck.

“Couldn’t sleep,” you rubbed your tired eyes, trying to focus on his face.

“‘M sorry darlin’, need anything?” He stood up from the couch, which was really just a bench with a blanket. He led you into the kitchenette and you waited as he poured you some water.

“Thanks… why are you still awake?” You sipped your water as he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I’m always worried somethin’s gonna happen to the boat if I fall asleep.” He watched as you finished your glass and put it in the sink. “You havin’ fun at least? I know we haven’t done much yet.”

“Ya I’m having a great time! I like doing nothing,” you admitted with a small giggle. “Plus I like watching you guys struggle with the fish.” That made both of you laugh under your breath.

“I like watching you too, sweetheart.”

Wait.

What?

You kind of just stared at him a little wide eyed while your brain processed his words. He had a sweet smile on his face like he didn’t just drop that bomb. He looked back at you and smiled wider when he saw the look on your face, the absolute shock that made your mouth slack open.

You were unsure of what to do at this point, it’s like your dreams were coming true but you had no idea how to handle it. Thank god he handled it himself by brushing his hand over your cheek, pushing a strand of hair behind your ear. You were pretty sure you malfunctioned because all you could do was stand there, unsure of how to take it.

“You looked so pretty, you always look so pretty.” He was staring at your lips now, clearly past the point of hiding this.

“Joel…” You almost wanted to pull away, this was kind of wrong.

His hand was still cupping your jaw, like he was unwilling to part from touching you. He looked into your eyes as he pulled you closer. Your heart was in your chest, this was wrong, you should pull away but couldn’t bring yourself to care at this point.

Your lips connected and you instantly melted, he was so warm and big, holding you in his strong arms. He held your waist close, pressing you against him.

The kiss was… something else. No one had ever kissed you like that before, maybe that’s the difference between boys and men.

His tongue slid over yours and you were lost, you both were. All semblance of shyness was gone as you devoured each other. His lips were soft as silk and his muscled arms held you close and roamed your curves. Neither of you wanted to part, even for air until you heard a noise coming from below deck. You reluctantly scrambled away from each other, worried your dad or Sarah would be walking up the stairs.

“I– I’m sorry darlin’,” he couldn't bring himself to look at you.

“Joel, I– it’s ok. Don't be sorry.”

There was a charged energy between you, like a spell neither of you wanted to break. He was the one to break first and he squeezed past you without so much as a look your way. You could tell he looked upset, ashamed almost and that hollow pit twisted in your stomach.

————

The rest of the trip went as usual, except for the fact that you and Joel couldn't keep your eyes off each other.

The only good thing was that your dad and Sarah were none the wiser. You weren't sure if Joel regretted the kiss or not, he seemed to have a permanent guilty look in his eyes. The memory of the kiss and the feeling of his lips on yours haunted you, unable to think of almost anything else.

When the boat docked at the end of the second day and as the group was gathering up the belongings to unload into the truck, you found yourself alone below deck with Joel.

Alone.

“Hey kiddo, ready to go home?” It was almost cold the way he regarded you now.

What the hell? What did you do? He can’t act all high and mighty, he kissed you! You only managed a scoff in response. That melted his icy exterior.

“Why ya givin’ me attitude?” His voice was just barely lower than normal volume, his thick brows knitted in the middle.

“Your acting like that was my idea last night.”

The left over desire from the previous night was boiling over into burning rage, but you couldn’t deny you were still soaking between your thighs.

“You kissed me, Joel!”

“Will you quit yellin’!” He backed you up against a section of wall in the small room. His deep rumble of a voice both angered you and turned you on.

“I’m not ye—,” your voice was cut of by his thick fingers covering your lips.

“Shut up. I swear darlin’, you’ve got a fucking mouth on you.” He was practically growling in your ear. You felt kind of filthy like this; pressed between a wall and Joel’s hard body, his hand smothering your sounds.

“You wanna get caught? Hmm?”

Your eyes sparkled back at him, almost begging him to fuck you here and now. Instead of indulging you, he took one last long look at you before turning away without another word.

—————

After he left you speechless below deck, Joel helped you pack the rest of the bags into the car and thus begun the 2 hour drive back. You sat behind Joel again, on purpose this time, knowing you had power over him now.

You spent the whole way home making eye contact with those big brown eyes in front of you. You did your best to convey your wanton need through your gaze, licking your lips and watching his eyes track the movement.

After you all said your final goodbyes, your dad ran inside to go to the bathroom and Sarah was passed out in the backseat, leaving you once again, alone with Joel.

“I had fun Joel, hope we can do it again sometime.” You refrained from hiding any of the sarcasm and giddy in your voice.

“You better watch yourself darlin’.” You could tell he really was worried about getting caught.

This was going to be fun.

#joel miller x reader #joel the last of us #joel miller #joel miller smut #the last of us #tlou #reader fanfiction #smut

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jq37 · 5 years

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The Report Card -- Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 1

Sophomores and Spring Break

Note: Hey guys! I decided to try something a little bit different and slightly more structured than my usual recaps for FH: Sophomore Year. I’m hoping this will be a little easier for me and a more useful tool for keeping up to date since there will be a lot more eps to keep track of and they’ll be easier to miss. Lemme know what you think and if you want raw, unfiltered opinions on anything specific, feel free to send me an ask. I’m always down to go off about literally whatever.

We’re back, baby! It is Sophomore Year at Aguefort and the gang is on Spring Break. A lot is going down so lemme break it down. The Bad Kids, having defeated Kalvaxus last year, are all entitled to a share of his hoard and all the red tape is finally cleared so they all get 20k gold each (which is an insane amount of money converted to USD if you use the WOTC conversion rate of a gold coin being around $145 (circa 2006 when they answered the question)--which would be close to $330 with inflation). Jawbone and Sandra-Lynn are moving in after less than a year into a profoundly haunted house and it’s kind of a Full House situation because Adaine, Fig, Kristen, and Tracker all officially live there (plus it seems that Zayn has also anchored himself to Adaine’s tower--btw, Adaine took the tower that the haunted house obviously has) and you know all the other Bad Kids are gonna be there on the regular.

More importantly, Aguefort gives the gang their big project for the year--finding the crown of the Nightmare King which was stolen at the end of last season--which is worth 60% of their grade (Adaine does a full Hermione at this information). Each of the gang has info about the NK but the trail has mostly gone cold. Luckily, Fabian just got a hot tip about where Falinel is keeping Aelwyn and she seems like a pretty good lead to start with since she was super tied up in the bad side of all the messiness of last year. Adaine is displeased to say the least.

Going off to find the crown is super exciting story-wise for two reasons. First of all, it means the gang gets to hire, well, hirelings to help them and temporarily join the party! They ping basically every cool NPC they can think of (except for Tracker for some reason which is BONKERS because (1) she probably would have done it for free and cutting her in would still be keeping the money in the family, (2) she’s dope as hell, (3) she’s a cleric and the party can always use more healers, (4) she’s a werewolf so presumably she has skills that would help in the woods, and (5) they’re t r a c k i n g down a crown and the girl’s name is literally T R A C K E R, but I will not backseat D&D) and eventually end up with Ragh (who has been without an adventuring party all year, poor guy), Sandra-Lynn (swayed by a nat 20 rolled by Fig), Cathilda (!?) ,and, for some reason, Gilear (which Fabian is happy about, mainly for the opportunity to maybe bump him off on the way). Second of all, if you recall, Elmville is a pretty modern town but the rest of the continent is less fantasy high, more high fantasy. Horses and lanterns and all that pseudo-medieval goodness. They are gonna stick out like a sore thumb. I am very here for it.

Everyone goes home to rest up but, after some ominous dreams, only four of them wake up. Riz and Fig are left asleep and then Brennan mic drops and ends the episode which is a power move and I am extremely upset about it but also, respect. Right for the jugular immediately. I heard Murph and Emily are on tour in the UK next week which probably has something to do with this but, in the moment, I did not know that and I really felt the hammer drop in my heart. It was wild. Cannot wait to see where we go from here. Plus, who doesn’t love watching characters freak out because their friends are in danger?

Random Thoughts

I have no idea what the title of this episode is or if it’ll even have one and not a number but I gave it a placeholder one for now. I also don’t have access to the stream yet so I didn’t get to include some info I wanted to (like a record of nat 20s, and nat 1s so I can track their stats for the school year) and I probably missed some stuff because my brain can only hold so much info guys. I’m not Brennan.

I mentioned this yesterday during the stream, but there will never be anything better than the pure D&D joy of everyone, in character, talking over each other to clown on each other. They get the friend-group banter that’s a hair breadth’s away from bullying so true to life and it’s so fun to watch. On the flip side, the opening scene with everyone introducing themselves and affirmatively claiming each other as their best friends was also peak D&D. Found family= best trope.

Fig and Adaine burn spell-slots at basically the same time to try and beat each other to the best room in the (Scooby-Doo ass) house--which is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in this world. It’s such an intuitive setting. I love it so much. (BTW, Fig ends up staying in the false space under the revolving grand piano because, of course).

Fabian and Gorgug went to recruit Ragh, who assumed they were propositioning him for a three-way. In his defense, they did do it in a super proposition-y way and they were in the middle of the LGBTQ student union.

Also, Gorgug gives Ragh an inspiring speech about thinking you’re your own dad which makes him burst into tears.

Speaking of, Jawbone offhandedly says he’s poly but, like, based on some of the stuff he’s said, I feel like that’s not really a reveal. He also gets along well with Gorthalax and would be down w/ a three-way if Sandra-Lynn wanted to which, again, totally checks out.

Arthur Aguefort uses Chronomancy to rewind time and catch a snide comment Adaine made under her breath, which is exactly the kind of frivolous use of God-like power I’d expect from him.

I really love Adaine’s energy coming into this season. She’s in therapy. She’s in a good home environment. She’s comfortable enough with her friend group to do stuff like prank Fig (love that they’re gonna be living together now). And she’s good friends with Zayn now which I want to see more of based on their one interaction in this ep which was very cute. I am already on record as saying I would be down with her getting a ghost boyfriend--I mean, for the aesthetic alone--but I’d be happy with just more friendship.

Fabian is also hilarious this season because you can tell he’s gone a bit soft from having friends and leaning into that (the friendship necklace with Riz) but also he’s fully aware that it’s happening so he’s, like, ping-ponging back and forth like, “These are my friends,” and, “What am I saying? I used to be cool,” and it’s very funny. Very happy the Aelwyn storyline is happening right out of the gate, both because I think Aelwyn is a very interesting character with a lot of potential for nuance but also because Fabian reacting to her and Adaine reacting to Fabian reacting to her is always gold.

Prompted by an offhand conversation from Fig about rock and roll, Brennan--earning another feather for his Cap of God Tier DMing--goes on an impromptu five minute long improved diatribe about a bard who played such a good concert that it instantly impregnated everyone in attendance (dudes too) who gave birth to kids with sick rocker hair and denim jackets and ascended to Rock Heaven on their 18th Birthday. You truly have to watch it to believe it. At a certain point I thought he was gonna drop it but that was the moment he doubled down and kept going. Amazing.

Watching Murph, in real time, make up a girl/boy/whateverfriend in Fantasy Canada was a gift.

I don’t have access to the stream yet but best quote of the night that I can remember is Kristen choosing her room: This is triggering and I’ll take it. (Her line about her lesbian starter kit and the one about wanting a horse were also bangers).

The group talks about what they’re going to do for transportation outside of Elmsville since they don’t really use cars out there and they somehow get from “disguise Fig’s tour bus” to “commission Aguefort to create a brand new animal that can hold six people plus hirelings, one of which is Fabian who is also riding his motorbike”.

I love that Sandra-Lynn’s Mom Powers work on Tracker.

Basrar doesn’t accept the invitation to come with on the quest, but he does give Kristen a bag of infinite ice cream sandwiches, which is basically just as good, IMO.

Oh Gilear. The man is sleeping in the Seacaster garage, being bullied by skater kids, and now he’s stuck on this quest with his ex and Fabian who actively wants him dead.

Speaking of, I’m psyched to see more of Sandra-Lynn. She was kind of a sleeper badass at the end of last season.

Ragh is keeping secrets which I hope the cast doesn’t forget because it could be nothing serious (like the high school drama happening with Skrank and the 7 maidens--maybe he’s just crushing on Gorgug who did full kiss him during Promocalypse) or it could be Serious Business that will blow up if the don’t stay on top of it. We’ll see.

Oh, almost forgot. Adaine wants an emotional support frog. Every time I think I can’t love her more.

Detention

Fig for Not Respecting Personal Boundaries

Fig goes full Emily right out the gate and, after finding out that Skrank (nerdy bird dude who apparently can get it) was not only dating Ostentasia (rich, popular dwarf) but also dumped her in pursuit of Danielle Barkstock (one of Ostentasia’s party members, the scandal), disguises herself as him with Danielle to figure out what’s going on. And, wouldn't you know it, when she gives herself away, Danielle immediately is shocked and appalled, as you would be, obviously. We also learn that she’s still catfishing Dr. Asha which is, how you say, for sure a crime. Fig, please, I’m begging you. Cease.

Honor Roll

Fig, Riz, and Adaine for Researching the Nightmare King

Fig made both lists, look at that. Wasn’t my plan for this to be a three-way tie (also didn’t expect to use the word “three-way” this many times in this writeup) but I think their contributions were pretty much equally valuable. Rainsolo on the Discord wrote up this summary of the lore dump Brennan gave them.

#fantasy high #fantasy high spoilers #dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #the report card #report card

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worryinglyinnocent · 4 years

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So, at 5am this morning in the throes of insomnia, I had an idea for a Bleak House fanfic. As you do. Because man, it’s depressing, and I like making things happy.

The idea is insanely long and convoluted, much like Bleak House itself, and I shall likely never ever write it, but I wanted to get the idea down anyway.

So voila! Worry’s Bleak House idea. It is 300% more queer and, unfortunately, 1000% more historically inaccurate.

Under the cut because it’s so ridiculously long. Apparently, my brain likes to be detailed when I can’t sleep.

So! We begin way way back before the book/ TV series begins. Please note I’m working primarily from the 2005 TV series.

Honoria Barbary finds out she’s pregnant. James Hawdon is MIA likely dead. The only other person who knows about the pregnancy is her sister Frances, who Does Not Approve.

Honoria decides, in the wisdom of blind panic, to run away, eventually making her way to Bleak House. The Jarndyce family are acquainted with the Barbarys (John Jarndyce is friends with Frances through Lawrence Boythorn but was never as close to Honoria).

I’m not sure on canon timelines, but this is all happening circa 20 years prior to canon beginning, going from Esther’s canon age. Anyway, John Jarndyce has yet to inherit Bleak House from his uncle, and the place stands mostly empty, with just a skeleton staff keeping it looked after, since Uncle Jarndyce spends most of his time in London obsessing over the Jarndyce & Jarndyce chancery case.

The housekeeper takes pity on Honoria - who is passing herself off as a young widow and calling herself Mrs Hawdon - and takes her in, giving her bed and board in exchange for working in the kitchen. This poses something of a problem as a) Honoria is having a difficult pregnancy and isn’t in the best of health having run away, and b) she’s an upper class lady and hasn’t done a day’s work in her life. The housekeeper (let’s call her Mrs Potts), quickly recognises this and reluctantly, Honoria shares her full story. Mrs P, being a kindly soul, agrees to keep the secret.

Time passes. Esther is born. Frances believes that the disappeared-without-trace Honoria is likely dead by now; since she does not have to care for Esther, she marries Lawrence Boythorn. Uncle Jarndyce commits suicide and John Jarndyce inherits Bleak House, returning there and intending to make it his primary residence.

Honoria, who knows John and knows he’ll recognise her, has another mad panic moment, but manages to avoid running away since she has a child to look after now. Mrs P attempts to hide her from John as best she can, but ultimately, the truth outs. John is shocked to say the least (he’d been told Honoria had died after a sudden illness), but nonetheless agrees to keep her secret and promises not to tell Frances.

Time passes. Honoria works her way up through the household and takes over from Mrs P as housekeeper when the latter retires. John pays for Esther’s education with a view to her becoming a governess, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that, because there are Plot Points at work here.

Namely, the one (1) scene that we got of Honoria and John interacting in the TV series made me ship them.

John and Honoria get closer and eventually marry, and a few months later John becomes guardian to Richard and Ada. Esther, now John’s stepdaughter, becomes Ada’s companion and the two ladies begin to fall for each other.

Whilst this is going on, Honoria finds out that James may indeed still be alive after recognising his handwriting on legal documents like in canon. (Tulkinghorn and Kenge both use Snagsby as a stationer so it’s perfectly plausible that James could have copied papers for Kenge which end up with John and Honoria sees them that way, as opposed to copying papers for Tulkinghorn that then go to Sir Leicester that she sees as in canon. I do sometimes think things through properly...) However, unlike in canon, since John knows about her past relationship with James, there’s no subterfuge going on and they set out to see if they can find him, figuring that Esther deserves to know her birth father if nothing else.

Off they all go to London - Richard’s supposed to be starting to study medicine there anyway - where who should enter the scene but Allan Woodcourt. He helps them find James, thankfully before he carks it this time, and Oh God THE ANGST.

Ahem.

Richard stays in London and Allan promises to keep an eye on him and be a friend. Naturally, as these things are wont to do and because I generally always end up pairing the spares, Allan ends up as a bit more than a friend.

Meanwhile, we’re back to Bleak House, where James is being nursed back to health by Honoria, both of them in a rather delicate mental state since each thought the other one dead for nigh-on twenty years, and there’s the small fact that Honoria is married and genuinely loves her husband, but James is the first love she’s never forgotten and the father of her child.

(Ada and Esther are still going strong in the background, by the way. Everyone in the house is pretending they’re just gal pals.)

John offers James a position as his secretary once he’s recovered, and tells Honoria (in slightly more delicate language than me) that if she and James want to have an affair, he’ll turn a blind eye as long as they’re discreet about it.

Honoria isn’t exactly happy about this because she loves both of them, and in the end, after much angst and many conversations, a tentative but successful polyamorous relationship between the three commences.

Back to Ada and Esther and Rick and Allan. This being Dickensian times, they’re not exactly on the best footing for having proper relationships, but taking a leaf out of Honoria, John and James’s book, they decide that marriage is the way forward. Ada and Richard marry, as do Esther and Allan, and they end up living very close by to each other, allowing both ‘forbidden’ relationships to continue undisturbed. (Although interestingly, female homosexuality was never technically illegal in Victorian times because Queen Victoria didn’t believe it was possible and scratched out all mention of it in the bill that made male homosexuality illegal.)

And there we have it. It took me over an hour to type that, God help me if I do decide to write the blessed thing...

#Worryingly writes #sort of #Worryingly has epic ideas for Dickens fanfic at 5am and just runs with them

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bobbyboops · 4 years

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Random Question Tag #2

Thank you so much for the tag @lilithlibrxa, thank you for helping me occupy my time!

1. Tim or Bobby?

Oh this is hard! I guess I will go with Bobby, just because fusebox didn't give us the chance to have Tim as a love interest! Which is a crime!

2. Choose two Islanders (from any season) to be quarantined with, and why?

Bobby of course, we would have so much fun baking together and making endless pillow forts/ having all the lip sync battles. I would also choose Priya! I think that would be a really fun combination!

3. How/when did you discover the game?

I actually discovered the game like a year ago by accident haha I was watching love island UK and I went looking for the app for the tv show but found the game instead! I downloaded it because I was curious. I luckily started playing season 2 first and I feel really lucky I did! Because I don't know if I could have stuck it out if only season 1 was available!

4. If you could rewrite a scene, what scene would you rewrite?

Returning from Casa Amor!! First I would have tackled my man Bobby so fast when he came out single, and been kissing his whole freckled face! Also I would have shown that Nelly music video circa 2002 time traveler *Blake the snake* who the real bad bitch in the villa was, and I wanted my friends to stick up for me and shut her down as well! Like are you honestly going to sit here and tell me that Priya and Bobby just sat there and did nothing?! Nope, No, I refuse to believe it. Even Lurik/Noah saying like Blake that is uncalled for. Come on. 🙄

5. Favourite challenge?

Heart rate challenge. The only thing I would change is give me an opportunity to dance up on everyone haha. Or the Dunking challenge from season 1, because I would have liked to dunk so many people haha.

6. If you could put/ship two Islanders together, who would you put together and why?

Chelsea and Henrik... I think they are actually really cute together haha they are like Milo and Otis. They would be best friends for sure! I also would have been interested to see Marisol and Elisa together.

7. Describe your ideal S3 LI.

A mix of Bobby, and Kassam. Really funny and outgoing, but with some sarcasm, who is also kinda chill. Also slightly jealous (Not too much because that is such a turn off but just enough to know that they are really interested.) Someone I can joke around with, who will stick up for me! Or at least pull me out of nonsense situations (Think Ovie from Love Island UK when he pulls his girl out of the fight, just silently walks up and says nope lets go.)

8. New or old Hannah?

Old Hannah, she was annoying and whiney but at least she wasn't a bitch with lame ass intentions at revenge. Also that hair is just hard to look at. Also it was hard for me because I felt like fusebox was making it seem like she had to change who she was for people to notice her. Say it with me YOU DONT HAVE TO HAVE A “GLOW UP” TO BE VALUED! YOU HAVE VALUE AS YOU ARE! AND THE RIGHT PERSON WILL SEE THAT!

9. Who was dumped too soon?

Priya! She deserved to stay! Also I wish Henrik and Lucas could have both stayed in the beginning! As I stated in another post I wish that Operation Nope and the Rocco debacle could have been switched in their timing. That way there wasn't the double dumping until day 11 or 12.

10. Jakub or Felix?

Ugh that's a hard one. I guess Felix because I would just roast him all the time, and I feel confident I could beat him in a physical fight haha. Jakub would Hulk Smash me and that scares me.

11. Henrik or Lucas?

Another hard one!! They are so different and bring different things to the table! Lucas brings that passion, and bad boy energy. He lowkey scares me a little haha I feel like he would smell my vulnerability and cowardly self from a mile away haha! But Henrik brings the fun dumbass energy like a big puppy! I guess I would choose Lucas, just because I would never be caught dead in the wilderness with Henrik... I like nature for a few hours haha then I want to be inside. “Try to take me camping and I will divorce you” was a direct quote I said to my husband at an early point in our marriage hahaha

12. Jo or Hope?

Hope. I have never done a Noah route so we are always friends. I hate her relationship with Noah, and I think she is a terrible girlfriend, but she was always a good friend to me.

13. Lottie or Priya?

I actually love them both! I don't like all of the hypocrisy with Lottie, but she does have good character development (IMO) But I guess I will choose Priya just because of that.

14. What originally drew you to your LI?

I have a type I like long and lanky funny guys who are nice. I am who I am... 🤷🏼‍♀️ Every girl growing up was like CHANNING TATUM!!! and I was like Matthew Gray Gubler and Eddie Redmayne! hahahha

15. Favourite LI of all time (both seasons)?

Bobby, no surprises there, but I also love Jake! And if Tim had been an option I would have for sure gone for him haha.

16. Favourite scene/day?

I love the final date when Bobby asks you to be his girlfriend! Also the night before the final when we get to give our soppy speeches! I’m soft what can I say?

17. Who had the best character development?

Lottie improved greatly throughout the game! But I don't love her with Gary. She was too possessive! That is not an attractive quality to me at all, and imagine if the roles had been reversed and a boy kissed a girl one time and then became a possessive mess? But as a friend she had great development.

18. One thing that irked you about the game?

That MC never got to stand up for herself, and that she was dragged into so much unnecessary drama, that honestly wasn't even that interesting. Also the drama rarely ever had anything to do with MC directly! That was annoying. Also that they kept shoving down our throats that HOPE AND NOAH ARE THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD! BITCH WHERE?!?!?!? 👀👀👀

19. Season 1 reunion or Season 2 wedding?

I actually never played the season1 reunion... I didn't have 40 gems lying around burning a hole in my pocket. Also I just didn't care that much haha. But I did enjoy the wedding, even though it was very generic.

20. Describe domestic life or a head-canon about/with your LI.

I picture lots of baking, little kids running around our back yard while bobby and I chase them around. Putting the kids to sleep and curling up on the couch to watch movies and make out haha. Lots of laughter, happiness, and beautiful little babies! Also probably a lot of annoyance because I am a clean freak and its canon that Bobby is kind of a slob haha. That would probably be the only thing we fight about.

21. Guess some of the Islanders surnames?

Oh geez ok

Chelsea Thomas

Priya Dayal

Lottie Campbell

Hope Stevens

Hannah Taylor

Blake Butthole

Shannon MacCarthy

I tag everyone who wants to participate!

#litg #litgchallenge #love island the game

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davidmann95 · 5 years

Text

Some Kingdom Hearts future thoughts

Have to get ‘em out! Went into some thoughts with my psuedo-review of III, but I’ve got others and stuff worth expanding on. I’ll put them under the cut since it clearly goes into spoilers, except for my boldest, most controversial guess: along with being announced either this year or next (since Kingdom Hearts has never reached the end of a calendar year after a release with nothing on the horizon) I think Kingdom Hearts IV is going to be a 2022 release. I recognize that sounds like an intensely generous timeframe, but I have several reasons:

1. Above all else by far: once again, Square Enix and Disney are going to be on Nomura’s ass, nose to the grindstone, to get him to start delivering these on a consistent basis again. Do you think they’re looking at Kingdom Hearts III topping sales charts and thinking “well, it sure was worth the wait”, or do you think they’re going “gosh, these are some nice sales, sure would be nice if it came out years ago and we had a bunch more similarly-selling titles by now, let’s try and aim for something closer to that in the future”. Especially-especially since Nomura and the actors aren’t getting any younger and the series is at a point where the core fanbase for the franchise as-is is going to be the primary target rather than new audiences, which means it has to wrap up in a timeframe where that’s still a viable market. So rapid, priority development and few if any more spinoffs. I mean, not as if there’s really a handheld platform for them to be on anymore.

2. My understanding (and this is going somewhat into the technical side of things, so I’m going thirdhand here based on what I’ve heard from others) is that the lifecycle of the current console generation isn’t going to run out for quite a bit yet, so they can reuse a lot of the assets and whatnot from III.

3. A big deal was made about Dream Drop Distance coming out on the 10th anniversary of the franchise, and given 20 is a much wilder number for this series than most equivalents when it’s about a single cast of characters going through a single story, I can’t imagine they won’t want to push that as at least a similarly big deal.

4. Finally, when things don’t go as catastrophically off the rails as III did, these games seem to have a fairly consistent 3-4 year development span (even III, once they announced the beginning of development in 2013, would have come out 2017-early 2018 if not for switching from Luminous to Unreal Engine), and for the reasons I listed above I think this is going to be on the speedier end of that.

* Firstly: the main discussion I’m seeing at this point regarding IV is “it’s gonna be a Kingdom Hearts/The World Ends With You/pseudo-Final Fantasy Versus XIII crossover!”, and I really expect and hope that isn’t the case. Not that I’ll be pissed if it is, I’m sure it would still be rad, but it strikes me as both unlikely and the lesser outcome. I don’t know that I see the powers that be diverting resources in one of their biggest cash cows towards a sequel to one of their minor games - one that’s already been in Kingdom Hearts, meaning its inclusion here wouldn’t reasonably be a huge enough deal to base a lot of the full story on - and a way to reimagine another project. And for that matter it strikes me as conceptually small-scale given the setup. Nomura went with a name in Yozora that doesn’t just have the bent meaning of Sora’s name but actually literally sounds like him, went with a setting that aside from the one cameo sign mainly screams to viewers “Sora’s suddenly in the real world, holy cow”, and unless I entirely misread it Verum Rex was presented as a total self-roast in Toy Box. It doesn’t strike me as spot-the-reference (even though that’s 100% in there) nearly so much as establishing a tonal contrast to Kingdom Hearts.

I joked initially about this being a Flash of Two Worlds! (linking to a description for non-comics readers who are here because I tagged Kingdom Hearts)/’Kingdom Hearts goes to war with its own gritty fanfic’ setup, but...I actually suspect that’s pretty close to what’s going on here? This seems like a send up of Final Fantasy’s relative self-seriousness and over the top Super Cool characters, as a contrast to Sora’s goofy open-hearted sincerity and optimism. It’s the Secret Movie aesthetic that some want not just more prominent but as the actual main tone of the series morphed into an entire universe all its own, and Sora, out of place, has to find his way through and back home even as the real threat mounts, and probably has to save this world and get through to its heroes who aren’t likely prone to grinning through off-the-cuff monologues about the heart. That is not only entirely my kind of ridiculous meta jam, it feels like a logical next step for the series: if the first trilogy was in part about growing up, the next (and I suspect last, as the Master of Masters and his Foretellers have been set up as the primordial antagonists of the entire mythology and this is where they’re coming to the fore; my old theory of Eraqus being the big bad of an intermediary trilogy looks solidly shot to hell) could very well be about reaching adulthood, in which case it makes sense Sora would have to pass through a near literal fire of Adolescent/Adult Cynicism.

* Speaking of where Sora ends up: I kinda doubt he’s literally dead, or that if he is it’ll last past the opening of the game. They’ve already made a big theatrical production of Sora dying twice now, the second time in the most literal way possible and just a few hours prior to this, so while third time’s the charm I think there’ll be more to it than that. The again common thing I’ve been seeing is that he’ll have to play the Reaper game to win his life back (not something I’m much familiar with but I think I’ve got the basics), but again, while it’ll certainly be part of the game I don’t think TWEWY is going to be the big thing here (like they’d really make that a bigger deal than the Final Fantasy elements have been), and he just dealt with the afterlife and had to essentially play a game to win his soul back, and this wouldn’t even be a game he’s unfamiliar with. My impression is he’s incorporated back and whole - if likely powered down from the ordeal to justify him being back at level one - and the mystery is less whether or not he’s truly alive so much as how he ended up here and how to get back.

* On the other end of things - and I realize it’s a risky prospect to suggest after her getting a shockingly small role compared to everyone else in III was the damning weak aspect of its otherwise basically perfect finale - I think this is where Kairi is actually going to start to come to the forefront. She and Riku would be at the head of a search that everyone would be a part of (they were there when it happened, they know death is negotiable in their world, and they’re good people who all owe him), her especially since he’s her boyfriend - they may not declare it outright but there’s clearly no ambiguity between the two of them as to their situation anymore - and the one he sacrificed himself for, and she’s out there fighting now even if she’s inexperienced. And Riku seems like he’s going to end up lost himself on the search, leaving her behind as the sole Destiny Trio representative. So even if she isn’t a playable co-lead I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one going on a more traditional Kingdom Hearts adventure searching with the rest while Sora and later Riku deal with the genre mindfuck. On the bright side if nothing else, she’s died twice now too and they’ve both been presented as dead in a “maybe this time for real” way for a finale, so while again third time’s the charm, I figure she and Sora are relatively bulletproof from here on out.

* Speaking of Riku, while this seems more like an old-school proof of concept trailer from I and II rather than the more recent actual scenes, meaning his appearance might well change just as Kairi was different in I’s Secret Movie than she really was in II, it’s very notable that he hasn’t aged at all. So likely instead of another tragic I to II scale timeskip of Sora being lost from his friends, it looks like IV will be picking up immediately and the search for him won’t take long to succeed. Also speaking of Riku, I seem to see people thinking he’s with Namine now? Not that that seems impossible, but while the scene as a whole is romanticized in that it’s basically a princess being carried away by chariot to her happily-ever-after, it reads to me less as an actual romance than Riku fulfilling his ‘brother’s promise. Though if Square/Nomura does want to really get into romance with the next trilogy, since Sora/Kairi is locked down maybe they’ll just say fuck it and do a whole Riku/Namine/Xion/Roxas Love Square situation.

* Actual prediction rather than analysis of evidence: I suspect this is the last major time the Destiny Trio is going to be split up, at least in the searching-for-each-other, not-knowing-if-everyone’s-alive sense. I was the search for Kairi, II for Riku, and now IV for Sora - that cycle looks to be completing. Wouldn’t be surprised if V and/or the finale was finally the three of them as the adventuring party as fans have wanted for so long, with III as the grand finale to Sora/Donald/Goofy.

* It seems early to predict the main villain, but at the same time everyone was accurate in assuming a Keyblade-wielding Xehanort would be the final boss of the trilogy circa 2006, so I’m gonna go ahead and say Xigbar/Luxu is gonna be the end-all with IV. The Master of Masters is still the end of the road, and perfect for it because he’s a real-world normal savvy guy who can manipulate this world of straightforward classical adventurers with ease, while Sora at the opposite end of the scale is silly and sweet even by that world’s standard. But Luxu addresses the same ideas in a way that’d be perfect for this game in particular as it seems to be set up, he’d be the villainous connective tissue as this game moves from one trilogy to another, and he has the dangling personal thread of the ‘reward’ he suggested was coming for Sora. Or hell, since now it looks like she’s at least somewhat privy to what’s going on, maybe Maleficent will finally step back up.

EDIT: Ooh, just remembered, speaking of what Xigbar says to Sora, his Olympus conversation also predicts Sora’s fate? The whole “if you leap in to save somebody, you might just end up in the clutch needing to be saved yourself” lecture, i.e. the premise for IV. Maybe his teach isn’t the only one privy to future events?

* Not both, they’ll wanna space it out, but I’m like 70% sure this is where Marvel or Star Wars are gonna happen.

* Finally, while I’ve heard speculation that the Mystery Star is one of the Foretellers or the person who died in that Union X game, I don’t think she’s one of them given it’s a new voice actor and she cites a name Sora knows. More likely she’s ‘Subject X’ (I went ahead and looked up the Secret Reports, haven’t gone back and done all the bonus challenges myself yet and won’t I imagine for some time), who does seem to be from that time but is I think someone new.

#Kingdom Hearts #Kingdom Hearts IV #Kingdom Hearts III #Analysis #Opinion

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 6 years

Link

Oh boy one of these again

“Even though both of these characters are awesome, fans can’t help but argue among themselves, so the question is simple: Who makes the better Spider-Man? Is it the new kid on the block who is winning new fans over left and right, or is it the classic Spidey that basically started it all?”

It’s Peter.

This isn’t even a debate.

One character is literally trying to be a replication of the other but throwing in some zigs where they zagged, whilst the other is the thing being replicated that also revolutionized comic books forever.

“As always, the answer to this question is: “it depends.” ”

Yes. It depends if you are a moronic clickbait author or not.

Do most Miles Morales fans even honestly argue that Miles is the best Spider-Man as opposed to just...great in his own way?

Like I’m pretty sure most Ben Reilly and Sam Wilson fans don’t try to honestly assert those guys are better than Peter or Steve.

“How do you even begin to measure something like this? ”

Who has had the biggest impact on the medium.

Who was most original.

Who has the most acclaimed stories.

Who has had the most comparatively unconvoluted narrative.

Who’s stories stick closest to the fundamental guiding ideas behind the core concept of Spider-Man and execute that the best.

Mystery solved.

20. MILES: BETTER ORIGIN

“The Peter Parker Spider-Man has an origin story that is downright iconic. There’s no denying that. However, if we’re being honest, then Miles Morales has a much better origin story. And it’s one that modern audiences will find a much easier time relating to.”

Hmm, a scientifically gifted teenager gets bitten by a super science spider and gains spider powers that he doesn’t commit to using altruistically for the wider community. Because of this he fails to intervene in a crime the results of which ultimately wind up killing a noble person he admired. From this he learned that his great powers should be used responsibily to help others and carried a burden of guilt around with him. o this end he dressed up in webbed spandex and became a crime fighter called Spider-Man.

Yeah...I can see how that is so much better and modern than Peter Parker’s origin...

This doesn’t even explain how or why the origin is better, it just says Peter’s origin is iconic but Miles is better and leaves it at that.

Surely if something is better than the iconic thing you’d have more to say about it.

“Miles, meanwhile, had to deal with his powers being stolen by an uncle (whom we saw briefly in Spider-Man: Homecoming) before Miles’ early exploits with Venom led to the loss of his mother.”

This isn’t part of his origin and therefore doesn’t belong in this section.

Moreover it’s asinine because it omits Peter’s early adventures to give the false impression Miles is better.

Let’s say Miles’ uncle stole his powers. Why is this somehow better than ‘My uncle is dead, I need to step up and replace him as the man of the house, also my aunt is chronically ill, I am cash strapped and I constantly get shit in both my identities’.

Call me crazy but wasn’t Spider-Man supposed to be ABOUT those normal life problems as opposed to the inherently fantastical problem of your magic science spider powers getting jacked?

Or your mother dying due to an ooze monster before she was literally resurrected like two years later negating all drama?

Even if his mother had remained dead, how does this make him better than Peter? His mother died. Wow. I’ve NEVER seen a superhero with a dead parent before. I’ve NEVER seen a female supporting character die in a superhero story before. Certainly not a Spider-man story. Certainly not a Spider-Man story that changed comic books forever before shallow repetitions like murdering the characters mother turned it into a mess of a cliché. A mess of a cliché that the same guy who did it reversed 2 years later.

“In this way, he feels a much keener guilt over the passing away of a family member than Peter Parker does”

**** please!

His mother came BACk to life two years later and it wasn’t like his ENTIRE motivation after she died was BUILT around his grief over her death.

Like Peter brings up Uncle Ben’s death so much that we needed to do a movie that SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T BRING IT UP!

And this isn’t even getting into how despite being a family member the best analogy for Rio within Peter’s story is Gwen NOT Uncle Ben.

And you cannot with a straight face tell any Spider-Man fan Gwen’s death was not AS keenly felt by Peter as Rio’s was for Miles.

Miles quit after Rio died and then an arc or two later after a time skip he was back in the saddle. Meanwhile literally 2 years worth of issues were devoted to depicting Peter’s grieiving of Gwen and then we also wouldn’t shut up about it for another 40 years!

“making him not only more motivated, but more sympathetic in the eyes of the readers.”

If Rio’s death made Miles more motivated than Peter...why did he literally quit being Spider-Man after she died?

This gets even dumber when you consider this article is drawing an analogy between Rio’s death and Uncle Ben.

RIO’s death motivated Miles to quit for A WHOLE YEAR!

Uncle Ben’s death motivated Peter to BE a superhero for *checks watch) 56 years and counting!

And what is this the tragedy Olympics? Miles deserves more sympathy because his mother died when he was fighting a villain than Peter does for when his father figure died due to someone he failed to stop?

At best BOTH things are equally tragic and worthy of sympathy.

At worst if you truly contextualize this, fuck no Miles doesn’t deserve more sympathy.

I’m not saying ‘screw him he deserved it’. I’m just saying of course Peter had it worse.

When Rio died that was the third major death in Miles’ life. His mother, his uncle and Ult Peter Parker.

Yeah, that’s 2 dead family members to Peter’s 1 circa Gwen’s death right?

Wrong. Peter lost his parents, his uncle which was his fault, George Stacy who was another father figure which he also felt guilty over and then also his girlfriend/practically his fiancé...which he also felt guilty over.

Then you’ve got the fact that Miles, whilst feeling guilty over Ult Peter’s death, didn’t actually know him personally. Peter knew all those people personally sans his parents, but they were still his parents.

And then he had to be the provider for May whilst having exactly zero emotional support from anyone other than her. Miles had Ganke through everything. Peter had jackshit and was also getting bullied and was also getting hated on by Jameson.

You can’t even say “Well Miles had it worse because he saw his mother die violently right in front of him.” Peter saw and CAUSED Gwen to die violently in front of him, he saw George Stacy die violently in front of him, he at least KNEW Uncle Ben died violenty and in his own home to boot.

And unlike Miles’ uncle or mother none of THOSE people came back to life!

19. PETER: CREATIVE USE OF POWERS

“Have you ever thought about how limited Peter Parker’s powers really are? No, seriously — he has spider-sense and super-strength, and he made himself some webs and that’s it”

-and, spider agility, and spider speed and you know wall-crawling the one thing his namesake, a spider, FAMOUSLY does!

“Seemingly every issue has him doing something new with his powers,”

Says someone who’s clearly not read much Spider-Man.

How the hell do you even begin to try and have him do something new in every issue across multiple monthly titles across 57 years my god!

18. MILES: COOLER COSTUME

“If you were trying to figure out what the most iconic comic book costume was, it may very well be Peter Parker’s Spider-Man costume. Those red and blue tights have inspired literally decades of comics fans, young and old. But we hate to break it to you: Miles Morales has the cooler costume.”

“The red and blue may be iconic, but it’s also difficult to translate into the real world, such as live action films.”

This is fucking moronic on four levels.

Level 1: It was a costume designed for a comic book which isn’t set in the real world or even in a live action medium so the point is fucking moot because the measure of a COMIC BOOK character’s costume is how well it works in a COMIC BOOK.

By this logic Batman’s costume sucks shit because it’s rarely translated well into live action and usually needed to be made all black.

By this logic ALL MANGA isn’t that great because none of it translates t the real world.

Level 2: If the thing is ICONIC then obviously is does effing work!

Level 3: Solid black with red patterning on top of it. Yes. I can see how this is very original and inherently better.

Level 4: The red and blue costume has literally been translated into film FOUR TIMES!

“Meanwhile, Miles’ black and red costume looks sleek and modern.”

Looking sleek and modern doesn’t counter ‘is difficult to translate to film’. Those are two separate things.

Moreover, it’s ‘modernity’ is afforded it by being again, mostly unoriginal.

Shit Spider-Man’s SECOND most iconic costume, which is also more iconic than Miles’, is even MORE sleek so does that make it more ‘modern’ too?

It’s the same nonsense as before, ‘it’s just better’. How and why!

“ It’s a perfect compromise between comic book sensibilities and real world aesthetics”

Which means it’s not as good in the medium it was designed for as another costume that was!

“and you can’t help but grin whenever you see it.”

That isn’t even a point, that’s barely even an individual opinion!

17. PETER: BETTER LOVE INTERESTS

“Sometimes, comparing Peter Parker and Miles Morales feels like comparing apples and oranges. ”

And reading this article comparing them feels like throwing up.

“That’s because there are some cool things that one hero has that the other doesn’t, meaning there’s no real comparison. ”

Okay like...first of all if the author actually believes that then what the fuck is the point of this list!

Second of all, the fact that they are comparing them means obviously they can be compared.

Thirdly the fact that they are literally both characters called Spider-Man, with spider powers, based in New York, who got their powers the same way, fight ostensibly the same villains and (allegedly) touch upon the same types of sub-genres and are both made by Marvel comics OBVIOUSLY MEANS THEY ARE COMPARABLE!

Like fuck dude, this isn’t like you are trying to compare Spider-Man to the Power Rangers!

“Peter Parker has had an epic romance with Mary Jane Watson, as well as dalliances with Felicia Hardy and Carlie Cooper.”

Really? You are going to list off a quick romantic history of Spider-Man and you mention MJ and Felicia and...Carlie Cooper.

A character not seen since 2014. A character who dated Spider-Man for like one year publishing time.

You will mention her but not, I dunno, Gwen effing Stacy?

16. MILES: MORE INFLUENTIAL

I’m face palming from just the title of this one.

“One reason that we think Miles Morales might be the better Spider-Man is because of how influential he is. And we’re not just talking about more and more fans discovering the character each year. A major bit of evidence is that his character highly influenced the insanely successful Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

Well I’m happy somebody is acknowledging Homecoming was basically a whitewashed Miles movie.

“An example of this is Peter’s friend in the movie, Ned Leeds. Longtime Spidey fans were surprised that he looked nothing like the Ned of the comics. That’s because his design and characterization was based on Miles’ friend, Ganke Lee. On top of that, we even see Miles’ uncle, Aaron Davis, played by Donald Glover. This gave many fans hope we’d see Miles Morales in the MCU!”

Just to be crystal clear here, this ‘article’ is asserting that Miles Morales, a character invented by Bendis and Pichelli less than 10 years ago, is more influential than the character that....literally every teenage super hero after 1962 was inspired by (including Miles himself)...who was created by one of the art Gods of all comics and the single most famous writer of comic books of all time.

And their ‘evidence’ for this was...one movie from last year...that he wasn’t even in...

15. PETER: FANTASTIC…FIVE?

There is nothing objectionable in this sans the fact that he joined the Future Foundation not the F4.

14. MILES: STEALTHY SPIDER

“We love Peter Parker’s abilities but if we’re being honest, they don’t always make a lot of sense. Detecting future danger and being super-strong is really neat, but it never exactly screamed “spider” to us.”

Spiders are very strong for their size. Hence ‘proportional strength of a spider’ as a commonly used phrase associated with the character.

The Spider Sense is more defencible as being ‘not a spider thing’, but there are still ways to explain it.

“It felt a bit like the writers were just making stuff up.”

...making stuff up is literally the definition of writing fiction...

“And if you’re going to make up some weird powers, we say “go big or go home.””

None of Peter’s powers sans his spider sense were even remotely weird if he was intended as a human spider.

“And that’s why we like Miles Morales’ cool stealth ability. His ability to blend into his surroundings creates some really fun stories, and adds a fun dose of Batman to the Spidey stories that we love.”

Not only is this dumb because being like another character is not a good thing (doesn’t it make you less unique), but worse it pretends like having stealth is something that’s even MORE insane for a spider than spider sense.

It’s not.

Spiders can camouflage into their surroundings like you know....shittons of animals people commonly know about.

13. PETER: AVENGERS MEMBER

Nothing that wrong here.

12. MILES: GALACTUS FIGHTER

“When fans argue about which characters are the best, there are plenty of different metrics. One of the biggest, though, is who the character has managed to fight. And if a hero is able to take on a villain well above their weight, it establishes just how serious they are.

So, how can you tell that Miles Morales is the best? He managed to take on Galactus. No, seriously — when Galactus threatened the universe, Miles Morales teamed up with resident big brain Reed Richards in order to get information and allies. While it was definitely a team effort, Miles should get credit for tackling a bigger foe than Peter Parker ever did.”

This is so fucked up it’s not even funny.

By this logic ANY TIME Peter contributed even a little to a team effort that ultimately led to beating someone it should count on his win record.

Okay then. In AvX he contributed to fighting the Phoenix, which is canonically MORE powerful than Galactus. He’s also contributed to fighting Galactus in Secret Wars. He contributed to fighting Onslaught who was approaching a Galactus level threat. He contributed towards defeating Scarlet Witch in House of M and restoring the 616 universe, Scarlet Witch also being even more powerful than Galactus in that story.

If you DIDN’T use this type of bullshit then Peter has taken on supremely more powerful foes than Miles.

Juggernaut, Hulk, Tri-Sentinel, Rhino. The entire X-Men.

Even the stuff that doesn’t make sense for either character put Peter ahead. Peter beat Firelord a Herald of Galactus, whilst Miles beat Blackheart, the son of Mephisto.

Let me remind you that Silver Surfer, also a Herald of Galactus, has beaten Mephisto himself.

Therefore Firelord is most likely put of Blackheart’s weight class.

11. PETER: CIA PARENTS

There is nothing incorrect in this but why is this a point in Peter’s favour? Spider-Man is supposed to be down to Earth so the more James Bond super spy craziness involved the more reductive it is.

Hell it doesn’t even make sense against Miles since Miles dad worked for SHIELD.

“We shouldn’t be surprised Peter is who he is when he had parents like this!”

Yeah or you know it could’ve been because of Uncle Ben as literally every version of Spider-Man spells out for us.

10. MILES: S.H.I.E.L.D. AGENT

“Just as you can judge a hero by who they fight, you can also judge them by who they fight alongside. When a character joins a team with a proud history and powerful members, it goes to show just how amazing that hero is. And this is why we love that Miles Morales is a member of S.H.I.E.L.D.

He was hand-picked as a hero with great potential and trained by the greatest secret agents on the planet and this is all the more impressive because he already has more training and experience at his young age than Peter had way back when.”

See what I said about about James Bond stuff in Spider-Man being a bad thing.

Also, if Miles is better because he fought alongside SHIELD, then by this logic Peter would be better because he was a member of the Avengers and FF...at the same time.

Moreover, whilst it’s true Miles has had more training than peter had, he hasn’t necessarily had as much experience.

And the point is moot if training and experience doesn’t translate into you being a better fighter, and at a comparable age, Peter definitely could’ve beaten Miles provided the writers didn’t cop out and have his Spider Sense not work so he can avoid Miles’ cheat code Venom blast.

9. PETER: CHEATING HIS DEMISE

“One time, Kraven filled Spider-Man with tranquilizer darts and left him to pass away, going so far as to bury him. Peter emerged alive, but he later “passed away” after fighting Morlun, only to be reborn with weird new spider-powers. It turns out you just can’t keep him down!”

Okay, but he also died in Secret Wars, Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War (the comic, not the movie, or it might’ve been Infinity Crusade).

8. MILES: BETTER SUPPORTING CAST

Oooooooooooooooooooooh boy can’t wait for this!

“Sure, given enough time, you may be able to rattle off a few additional names when it comes to Peter Parker’s supporting cats.”

This is such BS because Felicia alone is a more memorable supporting cat than any of the felines in Miles’ series.

LEARN TO SPELL CHECK ON THE ARTICLE YOU’VE BEEN PAID FOR!

“But when pressed, most people will simply say “Aunt May and Mary Jane.””

No, most people would say Aunt May, Mary Jane, Harry Osborn, J. Jonah Jameson, Gwen Stacy and possibly now Ned Leeds due to Homecoming.

And that’s just for Joe Average on the street. Actual comic book fans would say all those people and also probably Black Cat, Betty Brant, Joe Robertson, Liz Allan, Flash Thompson and possibly Norman Osborn and Eddie Brock (the latter being a mistake due to adaptations but still, they’d mention him).

“And while we’re calling them a “supporting cast,” they often don’t play a major role in the story.”

Almost like they exist to...SUPPORT the main story isn’t it? Wheras being a MAJOR character would be different.

This is also a BS metric to use for Spider-Man. Spider-Man’s core concept involves him being a normal guy in his civilian life who is also a super hero, with those two sides impacting upon one another.

Since most stories are mostly about the hero stuff it means that to get the supporting cast involved in major stories would make them involved in the super hero stuff and therefore make Peter’s civilian life NOT normal.

“With Miles, he gets to have his spider-cake and eat it, too. He has a major supporting friend in the form of Ganke Lee, who provides insight into both the personal and the superhero life of Miles. And Miles has an extended supporting cast as part of all those team-ups: Avengers, Ultimates — if Miles needs help, some A-listers are just a dial away!”

First off, by this logic Mary Jane from like 1984 and Aunt May from 2001 would count as equally as Ganke.

Second of all Ganke is literally the ONLY supporting cast the folks with the most cursory knowledge of Miles could name. Even under CBR’s nonsensical logic of Aunt May and Mj being the ONLY people anyone would know from Peter’s cast, that’s still two vs. one. The author brought up a point against Peter and then failed to demonstrate how Miles is better in comparison, probably because he wasn’t.

Thirdly the Avengers and the Ultimates are NOT supporting cast members, they are team mates!

Fourthly, by that logic Peter again has the advantage since the Avengers, F4, the (Netflix) Defenders, the X-Men and literally everyone he ever teamed up with in Marvel Team up count as his supporting cast!

7. PETER: DEALING WITH THE DEVIL

Forget what I said earlier. Now THIS really should be good!

“We’re going to keep saying this over and over again, but the best way to judge a hero is to look at the villains they have gone up against. And in the case of Peter Parker, he’s actually survived the greatest villain in all of history in the devil himself or, as they call him in Marvel Comics, Mephisto.”

That is such insane broken and desperate logic I almost want to love this article for trying.

Peter is better than Miles BECAUSE of the worst Spider-man story of all time.

Wow. That’s beautifully bonkers.

But seriously, this is...just holy shit.

Peter did survive an encounter with Mephisto...but Mephisto was never trying to kill him. They never exchanged blows at all.

Saying Peter survived Mephisto is like saying Miles survived God Emperor Doom in Secret Wars, therefore he’s more awesome.

Then you have the fact that Mephisto really, really, really isn’t even the greatest villain in the marvel universe. I hate to invoke Quesada, but he isn’t even the ACTUAL devil. He’s not even the ACTUAL guy who rebelled against God and was damned to be the ruler of Hell. He’s one of the 4 rulers of Hell alongside Satan, Satannish and Lucifer, who is the ACTUAL Biblical devil. In fact one of them (Satannish) is himself the SON of the Dread Dormammu and supposed to be weaker than his old man IIRC.

DAFQ are you the greatest villain when the DAD of one of your peers is a bigger deal than you are?

And if we ignore morality for a moment and look at raw power, shittons of antagonists are much more powerful and dangerous than Mephisto or else have been capable at times of owning his red ass.

Thanos. Firelord. Hela. Galactus. Annihilus. Dark Phoenix. Arguably Apocalypse and Onslaught.

“Longtime fans don’t like to remember this because it is a highly controversial story. ”

Longtime fans? It was only 10 years ago!

And the sequel was only 8 years ago!

And it got referenced explicitely THIS YEAR!

“Spider-Man basically gets Mephisto to save Aunt May’s life, but Mephisto’s price is that he will rewrite reality so that Peter and Mary Jane never loved each other. ”

Holy shit that isn’t even an accurate summation of the most infamous story ever.

Mephisto rewrites their marriage, not their love. And Spidey gets him to do nothing, it was an offer Peter accepted.

“Is it the clumsiest reset button ever? Sure. But Peter still survived encountering the ultimate evil.”

He survived in so far as he didn’t die. He objectively lost though.

6. MILES: PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS

“One of the weirder qualities of Peter Parker is how much he likes to keep to himself. ”

No one in the real world does that. And it isn’t like he has a rich friendship group or anything.

“Sure, he’s been on many teams (and that many more team-ups), but at the end of the day, he prefers to work alone.”

Except when he’s in Marvel Team up or with Black Cat.

“This isn’t the case for Miles Morales, which is why the young man has better allies than Peter does.”

Preferring to be a loner vs a team player doesn’t make you better or worse it’s just different. But even if it didn’t Peter has allies too. Most of Miles allies are also Peter’s and Peter has even more.

“Who are we talking about? Miles is both friends and allies with characters like Ms. Marvel, Nova, Amadeus Cho,”

And Peter is both friends and allies with characters like Captain Marvel (both female ones), the ORIGINAL more powerful Nova, and Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the original and holy fuck immeasurably stronger Hulk.

He’s also friends with Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine and most of the X-Men and Avengers and F4.

“He seemed to figure out something early on that eluded Peter Parker for many years: that it’s good to have a support system in place, especially as a superhero!”

And yet, Peter survivied on his own for years like a bad ass.

5. PETER: THE MAN, THE MYTH

“While the comic played coy and never confirmed this, it is strongly hinted that Peter Parker is part of centuries of “spider totems” that are chosen as champions. That means the spider that bit him was not powered by radiation: it had powers it wanted to give Peter, and only later passed away due to radiation. You may or may not believe it, but Peter quite likely has centuries of lineage fueling his powers!”

Again this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

4. MILES: BETTER VILLAINS

BWAHAHAHAHAHA...oh they’re serious...

Do you want to know the secret to nostalgia? Your brain only remembers the good parts of whatever you’re thinking about. Your buddy that loves ’80s music? Trust us when we say that he managed to brain wipe some pretty awful stuff — it’s a lot like that with Peter Parker’s rogues gallery.

Sure, there are some cool villains like Venom, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus, but there are also some real lame ones like the Shocker.

a) The author can go suck a dick, Shocker is awesome.

b) Yeah SOME cool villains like those 3 guys...and Carnage...and Kingpin...and Hobgoblin...and Rhino...and Scorpion...and Electro...and Vulture....and basically everyone under the Ditko run

c) By this logic Miles villains suck ass too because he’s fought many lame ones too

“Compared to this, Miles Morales has fewer villains, but that means fewer duds as well. ”

Super hero rogue’s galleries are not marked negatively.

It’s one thing if you have few good villains and most of the time you fight lame ones.

It’s entirely different if you have a lot of good villains, and way more disposable rarely seen lame ones. The lame ones don’t make the whole thing suck shit.

This is particularly asinine since most of Miles villains are either Peter’s villains or else the Ultimate versions of them.

What is worse is that by this logic BATMAN has a worse rogue’s gallery than Miles Morales!

“We’ll take cool villains like the resurrected Aaron Davis over Peter Parker’s C-list baddies any day!”

So would I probably but would you take him over Venom, Doc Ock or any of the Osborns!

3. PETER: ALIEN FIGHTER

I don’t even understand how this is a point in Peter’s favour

2. MILES: SPIDER-BITE

“As we said earlier, it often felt weird that Spider-Man wasn’t more like, well, a spider.”

He is like one the author is just a jackass.

“Which is one of the reasons we appreciate Miles Morales so much. In addition to having a cooler backstory”

A near identical backstory made cooler because the author said so...

“and a more realistic costume, ”

Which is bad because in a visual medium like comics where you aren’t bound by the constraints of reality (hence spandex looks awesome) ‘realism’ in your costume designs is not a good thing.

“Miles has more realistic spider-powers as well, including his “bite.””

...his what?

“With a simple touch, Miles Morales is able to incapacitate villains. Now, Spidey being Spidey, he still has to engage in some wild fisticuffs on more than one occasion, but it’s pretty cool to see that he can take down major bad guys with a spider-bite instead of just fists powered by “radioactive blood.””

Wow.

Lets unpack this.

First of all the author is such a dumbass they don’t even realize Miles’ Venom blast (not named because the author is a hack) is not a representation of a spider bite, but of a specific ability some species of spiders possess wherein they can paralyze foes with bio-electricity.

This is one of THE most well known things about Miles.

Second of all if this was analogous to a spider bite wouldn’t it i dunno involve his fucking TEETH!

Third of all this is Miles’ worst power. It sucks the drama out of action sequences because it’s an auto-win button which means he wins too easily or looks like a moron when he doesn’t just bust it out.

1. PETER: STOPPING THE UNSTOPPABLE

Again, there is nothing wrong in this, but like...how does this prove Peter is better.

This article made me ill

#spider-man #Miles Morales #Peter Parker #CBR #comic book resources #Ganke Lee #Rio Morales #SHIELD #Ultimate Spider-Man #SPider-Man: Homecoming

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sebeth · 5 years

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Crisis On Infinite Earths #2

Warning, Spoilers Ahead…

We start at the dawn of man where Anthro, the first Cro-Magnon man, is attempting to divert a herd of woolly mammoths (“serpent-noses”) from trampling his village.

While diverting the herd, Anthro shudders over the thought of Embra, his pregnant wife, giving birth to a girl: “Embra would never have a daughter…would she?”

I’m rooting for Embra to give birth to a girl. Go, Embra, go!

Congratulating himself on saving the village: “A hero? I am, aren’t I? Maybe the biggest hero the bear tribe ever…” *Klunk* Anthro is taken out by a tree branch. “It was a long beast or a serpent! He hit me when I wasn’t looking! Face me now, animal! Anthro is a hero!” As Anthro makes threats to non-existent attackers he catches a glimpse of a futuristic city. Anthro notices the herd of woolly mammoths have disappeared.

I fell in love with Anthro here. He was such a lovable dork.

We move on to the 30th century where the Legion of Super-Heroes are searching for Dawnstar. They also have to contain a rampaging herd of woolly mammoths that disappear as soon as they appeared.

The Science Police tell the Legion to call Brainiac 5. The Legion calls Brainy. He informs his team that the missing Dawnstar and wooly mammoths are the least of their concerns: “There’s anti-matter energy moving toward the earth from somewhere I still can’t determine! Enough energy to destroy not only us but the universe!”

Back to present day Gotham City as Batman battles the Joker. The Joker has murdered Harold J. Standish III because he wanted ownership of the millionaire’s copyrights. The fight is interrupted by the Flash who is requesting aid: “…Help me! Help someone…anyone! Please…Please…can’t you see the world? I…It’s dying all around me! Iris…Dying…the world is dying…may already be dead…save us…save us…save us…”

An unnerved Joker orders Batman to inform the Flash that he has no jurisdiction in Gotham City. The Joker has a hissy when Batman doesn’t order Barry to leave: “You caped and corpses-to-come have some sort of secret reciprocal deal, don’t you?”

What’s this? A Batman that treats his fellow heroes with respect instead of acting like a territorial douchebag for no reason? Shocking!

Batman pleads with Barry: “Where are you, Flash? I can help rescue you.”

The Flash disintegrates as Batman watches in horror. The Joker escapes in the confusion, fanboying over Batman’s detective skills.

This section makes me miss editor’s notes. Batman thinks about the Flash’s recent disappearance - Bam! - Editor’s note refers to you to Flash #350 so you can check out that story if you wish. Little corner in the bottom of the panel - why is that so hard for modern comics to accomplish?

Picking up where we left at the end of last issue: The Monitor explains to his assembled team the reason for this gathering. “Already more than one thousand universes have died.” Seriously? It took the death of a thousand universes to get your butt in gear? I would have thought the death of one universe would have been sufficient.

The Monitor’s explains the process: “The Anti-Matter force once more shatters the dimensional barriers…expanding outward, engulfing one universe and then another. Destroying all life…and hope. First your worlds will feel nature’s wrath as your planets cry out in agony…Worlds in upheaval: Earthquakes, volcanic disturbances, floods which will crush your coast-line cities like so many twigs beneath your feet.”

Firestorm rightfully calls out the Monitor for selling weapons to various villains for the past year. I mean, that is a strange course for saving the universe. The Monitor appeared in various issues before the Crisis mini-series as a weapons dealer for the bad guys. It was foreshadowing for the Crisis series along with the red skies that appeared in various comics.

Harbinger angst: “I will stand at your side…Yet why do I feel as I do? A force, and energy…burning inside me?”. Probably because of the shadow thing that possessed one of your duplicates last issue.

Psimon steps up, talks trash, and is smacked down by the Monitor.

Superman, as elder statesman, tells everybody to calm down and listen - the fate of the multi-verse is at stake: “I suggest, however, we hear him out. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll save our worlds. If he’s lying, no power exists that can defeat us all.”

I miss sane elder statesmen who restore order as opposed to team leaders who let a situation escalate out of control while a cosmic level threat is bearing down on the planet. I’m looking at you A vs X’s Captain America, Cyclops, and Wolverine. Save the universe first, pissing contests later.

The Monitor reveals he’s splitting the group into five teams so they can activate his machines in five different time periods.

Harbinger continues to angst: “I am unable to resist him. And I am forced to obey his commands. Forgive me…though you have been my father and more…I now betray you.” Monitor, meanwhile, is aware of her betrayal and that she will be the cause of his death. Maybe they should consider talking to each other? Poor communication kills!

The Guardians of Oa are on the verge of completing (again) the Green Lantern Corps. However: “No, Guardians…It’s too late. You shall no more summon your soldiers than prove a threat to my plans. What began with you so many centuries ago…ends with you now!!!” *SKRAAAAAA!* Huge explosion and unconscious guardians. How many threats to the universe have the Guardians created at this point? We have the Manhunters, the voice holding the grudge, later on its Parallax. Maybe the Guardians should be neutered for the sake of the universe?

A shaken Batman summons Supeman (Earth-1) to discuss his vision of the Flash. Superman arrives late as had to deal with an unexpected volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean. Remember, the Monitor warned earlier that natural disasters were the first sign the Crisis was nearing your planet.

Pariah briefly appears to repeat his gloom and doom mantra.

Batman and Superman share a look that all but says “Do you know this emo freak?”

Bruce notes: “He said the earth was dying. That’s what Flash said. What’s going on here?”

On to Kamandi’s world. For those unfamiliar with Kamandi - think Planet of the Apes. Animals have become the sentient rulers and humans are hunted. Kamandi is investigating a huge tower that has suddenly materialized. Kamandi encounters Superman (Earth-2), King Solavar, and Dawnstar. Kamandi recognizes Superman as he has met Earth-1 Superman. Kamandi is initially fearful of Solovar due to the political situation of his planet. Shadow demon attack! Solovar is wounded defending Kamandi.

Harbinger apparently rescued the Luthor baby from the abandoned JLA headquarters. Lyla checks on him only to discovers he aged up to childhood.

Arion, Obsidian, and Psycho-Pirate travel to pre-sunken Atlantis circa 40,000 year in the past. We meet Lady Chian, Arion’s love interest. Pariah appears, Psycho-Pirate uses his abilities to make Pariah laugh. Pariah acts like it’s a fate worse than death. You would think after his eternal suffering emo act he would appreciate a few moments of levity.

Psycho-Pirate attacks the Atlanteans only to be stopped by Arion and Obsidian. Psycho-Pirate disappears in a flash of light. A mysterious voice tells the Pirate he will “serve me as I demand”.

The Monitor is frustrated by the disappearance of Psycho-Pirate: “My dear, I needed him more than either Obsidian or Arion. The menace we deal with is one of emotion”. Equally frustrating for the Monitor is his inability to find Raven: “I can find no trace of her. If she is on this earth, everything about her has been changed.”

I’m mentally trying to sync up the Teen Titans storylines with the Crisis. Teen Titans was one of my main titles in the 1980s but it has been over 20 years since Crisis on Infinite Earths. I know we’re past the Judas Contract and Donna’s wedding and pre-Starfire’s return to her planet. I can’t remember if the second battle with Trigon has occurred yet – the one where Raven becomes red and four-eyed and ensnares the Titans in their worst nightmares. It would explain the “changed” life if the Crisis is happening during or in the immediate aftermath of the Trigon battle.

Finally: “Lyla, my dear, get me the file on the new Dr. Light! It is time for me to create her!”

Pariah reveals more of his origin: “No, not from this earth, but another…the first that fell when this insanity began. But long after I was cursed for an evil act I had committed. A deed I have paid for a thousand times over, and must suffer still a thousand times more. I witness tragedy and my being here means disaster is soon to strike.” Pariah mentioned his “great sin” last issue too.

Pariah:

1) From the first universe to die in the Crisis. How long ago did the Crisis begin? The Monitor noted earlier that over one thousand universes have perished – has this taken months, years, decades?

2) Survived the Crisis but committed a horrendous act “long after”.

3) Someone very powerful cursed him to suffer for eternity.

Pariah finishes his “woe is me” speech by noting “Anti-matter will sweep throughout this universe. In a matter of hours from now, your earth will die!”

Arion, Obsidian, and the Atlanteans look to the sky and witness the arrival of the anti-matter wave.

Another awesome issue. George Perez’s art is gorgeous as usual. Marv Wolfman’s writing is terrific. He’s handling a huge cast of characters and nailing it. The big crossover events aren’t my thing, I find most to be average at best but Crisis is amazing.

The issue ends with the possessed Harbinger reporting to they mysterious man in black.

I continue to miss aspects from this era of comics: editor’s notes, sound effects, heroes working together instead of mindlessly brawling, c-list and obscure characters (my favorite type), and the sheer scope of the DC multiverse. Bonus points for the amount of content packed into a single issue.

#Crisis On Infinite Earths #Batman #Superman #Flash #Teen Titans #Anthro #Kamandi #Legion Of Super-Heroes #Bruce Wayne #Barry Allen #Clark Kent #Raven #Arion #Pariah #Guardians of the Universe

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authorlaragrey-blog · 6 years

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Original Fiction Fest Introduction

@originalficfest About the Writer: Hi, I’m Lara Grey. I’m 36 now and have been reading, and making up entertaining stories, since I was four. At least, I always found them entertaining. I started seriously writing fiction, honing my craft as they say, in about ninth grade. Having been raised primarily on horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, these are the genres I tend to feel compelled to write in. The WIP I am currently focused on finishing:

Title: Bloodstained Shadows (first of a series without a definitive end in sight)

Genre: Dark Urban Fantasy

Blurb: Shadow Cove, Oregon is known among the paranormal population as the only town where they can openly be what they are, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets along. Many paranormals choose to blend in with, or live on the fringes of, human society rather than deal with the inevitable drama and politics. But when Kyra Waters needs to obtain justice for the murder of her mother, Shadow Cove is the only place where it can be found. A Few OCs (among many) in WIP: Kyra Waters: Kyra Waters: werelion; mixed race; average female height in human form; lean muscle; amber eyes; brown hair; confident, but unafraid to show honest emotion; unconcerned with how feminine or fashionable she may or may not appear at any given time; tends to wear baggy sweats and stretchy clothing to accommodate the fact that she may shift to her were form; an efficient and focused hunter, maybe too single-minded when she has a specific target in mind Grew up with her Pride in the Mojave desert, though most of the older Pride members were born and raised in Shadow Cove; approx. 21/22 years old. Mei Song: father originally came to America from China to work on the railroads in San Francisco. He was one of the first Chinese people to bring his family to America from China, to settle in Chinatown circa 1890-ish. Mei (Ling) was about 10 years old at the time she came over to America with her mother and older brother (Tai (Bo?), about 13 at the time). She and her family lived in Chinatown for about 10-ish years before she was turned by Joseph. So she was about 20 when she was turned, she turned her brother about 2 years later, so he was around 25. At the time she turned her brother, she was pregnant with twins: Hellynn and Madison. Joseph was of the mind that born vamps are evil, soulless. He wanted to kill them before they were born or at birth. Mei turned her brother, originally, to give him the strength to defeat Joseph. Hell and Mad were born around 1905-ish. In 2018, that makes them around 113-ish years old, though they would appear to be only around 25 - having stopped aging as soon as their bodies stopped developing. Mei tends to be bubbly and carefree, until she’s ticked off. She loves bright colors, particularly yellow. She owns an underground (literally) vamp nightclub in Shadow Cove, along with her brother. There are tunnels leading to this club, underground, to much of the rest of the city and surrounding area. It was built as a speakeasy in the 20’s and used to smuggle people in/out when necessary. Eric Campbell: pale; blonde; blue eyes; father was full fae; mother was talented witch; both disappeared when he was about 7 and are presumed dead; he was born in 1994, and is about 24 years old; snarky and sarcastic; has been raised by Aunt Cate since his parents’ disappearance. Gabriel Azure: works for Treaty Enforcement/Shadow Cove Sheriff’s Department; does hang out with paranormals, but also hangs on to some of the more traditional hunter beliefs (such as that this world does/should/originally belonged to humans and should be left to them, but paranormals should be accepted “as immigrants” rather than harassed or treated poorly). Has been friends with Eric Campbell since high school. Knows Mei and Tai, Madison and Helen. His mother sits on the Council of Shadow Cove in representation of the hunter population. *Titles and/or names are subject to change at any time because God, I mean the writer, may decide they should for whatever reason makes sense in the moment. ;-) I’m looking forward to participating in Original Fiction Fest! It sounds like fun, and I can’t wait to see all the original fiction and OCs other writers plan to show off!

#oc #ocs #characters #original writing #original fiction #original characters #character bios #original fiction fest #originalfictionfest #fiction #urban fantasy #dark fantasy #paranormal #horror #blurb #summary

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oliveratlanta · 4 years

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As investment pours in, a ‘new Stone Mountain Village’ aims to rise

The village’s Main Street and its proximity to Georgia’s most popular tourist attraction, as seen about five years ago. | Courtesy of Stone Mountain Downtown Development Authority

Brewers, developers, creatives, and other entrepreneurs call the village an up-and-coming, historic gem among metro Atlanta downtowns—its reputation be damned

The tour of what Jelani Linder and other enthused locals are calling the “new Stone Mountain Village” begins on a chilly Friday afternoon, at a local joint opened in 2018 called Stoned Pizza Kitchen, where every pun is intended. Linder, a Coldwell Banker Commercial Metro Brokers agent, is an unabashed ambassador for the village and a seasoned tour guide. He holds a masters degree in urban planning from the University of Georgia, serves as Stone Mountain’s Downtown Development Authority chair, and recently bought one of the city’s few new houses nearby with his wife, Shani. Before all of that, though, Linder grew up in another DeKalb County city, Decatur, when it was hardscrabble—back when his pals considered venturing into tony Oakhurst dangerous and gentrifying Kirkwood “a sin.”

Linder sees in Stone Mountain Village the next hip place, a refuge for Atlanta’s priced-out populace, and to prove it, we trek down East Mountain Street to—what else—the renovation project that’s becoming the city’s first big brewery.

“Once people can get over the perception, they get it,” Linder says of his city, en route. “It’s like a cult here, I’ll be honest with you, when people buy in. The enthusiasm, the excitement.”

Scheduled to open in March in a long-abandoned Pure filling station and auto shop, Outrun Brewing Company eschews the typical brewery motif of brick, reclaimed wood, and pipes; instead there’s pink neon, an arcade game the business is named for, and a “retro-futurism” vibe that feels like Stranger Things meets Miami Vice meets Milwaukee. The proprietors are two funny suds aficionados, Josh Miller and Ryan Silva, who met each other while running brewing operations at Decatur’s Three Taverns. It’s not long before they start echoing Linder’s boosterism, lending some credence to his “cult” quip.

Inside the forthcoming Outrun.

The former filling station’s patio affords mountain views.

Miller: “There’s so many new businesses coming into Stone Mountain. It’s potentially the next big area.”

Silva: “It’s not much different than Decatur 15 or 20 years ago. It could be another Decatur.”

Miller: “People always say, ‘You’re all the way out in Stone Mountain’—all the way out? Have you driven the 15-minute drive? I take Memorial [Drive] from the eastside, and there’s never traffic, no matter what time it is.”

Silva: “The reality is, a lot of people can’t afford to live in [Atlanta], and that’s fine. We’re trying to bridge the gap between the city and the severely underserved suburbs. We wanted to be in on it from the start, not the tail end. We want to be part of building the community up and the struggles that are part of that.”

(Whether the small city could handle an influx of new residents remains to be seen, however. More on that shortly.)

Miller: “There’s so much raw potential here. All it takes is a couple of people saying, ‘Hey, let’s try something.’ And I think that’s happening now. That’s how these towns get started. It’s going to be a whole new world.”

Linder, grinning near the entrance: “If you look at our street grid, it’s what Suwanee and all these new communities are trying to duplicate. We’ve had it for 100 years—now we’re just trying to fill in the gaps.”

Jelani and Shani Linder, outside a forthcoming barbecue restaurant from a Decatur chef.

The residue

Beyond the brewery’s garage doors, the future patio for Adirondack chairs, and a towering magnolia stands an amenity that no other historic downtown in metro Atlanta can claim: the world’s largest piece of exposed granite, like the pate of a balding giant. Stone Mountain Park—the rock and private adventure grounds—is Georgia’s most popular tourist attraction (4 million annual guests strong) and one of the most-visited in the entire Southeast. There’s a 3,200-acre wonderland of trails and recreational sites around the mountain, all free to anyone who might, say, grab a pizza or beer in the village and walk or bike six blocks to the park.

Getty Images

The park is also home to the country’s largest shrine to the Confederacy, the enormous bas-relief sculpture of three Civil War leaders carved into the northern face, and a long, sullied history of Ku Klux Klan rallies and racist gatherings, including KKK parades as recently as the 1980s and an alt-right rally in 2016. The monadnock’s climbable, moonscape beauty includes a carving of Gen. Robert E. Lee as tall as a nine-story building—recently decried as the “largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world”—and the boulevard ringing it all bears the general’s name. The park was promptly closed last year when white supremacists attempted to rally during Atlanta’s Super Bowl. And though a group called Georgia Tourism Product Development Team has stepped in to help counter the reputation with reality, as the AJC reported last year, social media has played no small part in wedding the majority-black area with images of chanting, Confederate-flag waving white nationalists.

Sure, the symbols harken back to important American history. But they represent a glaring contrast to what’s becoming a more charming, diversified, and progressive former railroad village just beyond the park gates, where a wave of private investment promises to turn dead storefronts into a more organic type of attraction.

“This growth was bound to happen,” says Dorian DeBarr, Decide DeKalb Development Authority’s interim president. “As investors educated themselves and took an opportunity to actually experience what the village has to offer, it was a no-brainer.”

Main Street scenes today.

More broadly, DeKalb saw a surge of capital investment in 2019 to more than $1.1 billion—eight times the previous year—and growth as an entertainment industry destination, with productions as disparate as Dolly Parton Presents, Watchmen, Bad Boys 3, and Jumanji: The Next Level filming nearby. The mountain itself, of course, was immortalized in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most iconic speech, and this village of less than two square miles is where TV, music, and film superstar Donald Glover grew up.

So the contrast runs deep, like the granite. And for some, it stings.

“When you look at South DeKalb as a whole, it’s majority black, so you have to take that into consideration,” says Alan Peterson, the city’s Downtown Development Director with the DDA. “The monument, it’s state-owned. It’s history. It happened. There’s nothing we can do about it, and we’re just trying to move forward.”

The decline

Linder estimates that, as of a few years ago, between 60 and 70 percent of the early 20th century storefronts along Stone Mountain’s Main Street were vacant. Which makes a scathing Facebook review of the “ghost town” village, deposited on the city government’s page in 2016, no surprise:

“Only a few businesses remain and I can’t for the life of me understand how they are sustaining,” wrote one unimpressed patron. “The look on tourist faces when they visit downtown varies from shear surprise [sic], to disappointment and all-out disgust.”

The vacant, circa-1905 Stone Mountain Inn building is located down the block from most recent retail activity.

That description conflicts with the bustling hub the village used to be. During Reconstruction, the Main Street area sprang into a center of tourism and industry hinged on quarrying. Local granite was shipped across the world, used in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, the Panama Canal, and in at least one building in almost every state in the U.S., including in the foundation of the Lincoln Memorial.

When the grounds around the mountain operated as a less-commercialized state park, the village was where tourists came for lunch, souvenirs, even a store that peddled butterflies, often riding a train that connected the two attractions. The state still owns the mountain but is leasing commercial operations for at least the next quarter-century to Norcross-based Herschend Family Entertainment, which owns or operates many other themed tourist hubs, such as Dollywood in Tennessee. The privatization deal began in 1988, and longtime locals say the village’s vibrancy soon changed, as the park’s main entrance was shifted to a U.S. Highway 78 exit, the village train ceased, and visitors began skirting the old town.

“I mean, they’re in business—nobody can blame [Herschend] for trying to keep the business in the park,” says Rory Webb, co-owner of Main Street bistro Stone Mountain Public House, who lives in a historic village house nearby. “But when they did all that, they virtually strangled the town. And I think a lot of the businesses weren’t willing or able to change with the times, to morph.”

Another struggle has been the misperception of rampant crime.

Business owners and longtime residents say two or three police officers from the city’s small department are seen patrolling the city’s 1.7 miles at most times, lending a sense of quietude—a bubble, even. Stone Mountain Police Department statistics show violent crime rates in 2019 at four per every 1,000 residents—or about 1/6 of the national average. An average of 21 property crimes, however, were reported per month last year, so it’s relatively safe but not exactly Mayberry.

“The worst thing is, a lot of people hear ‘Stone Mountain,’ and they think of unincorporated Stone Mountain,” says Webb. “You turn the news on, and there’s a stabbing or shooting in Stone Mountain, but you look, and it’s the DeKalb police, not inside the village.”

“It’s frustrating,” the DDA’s Peterson concurs. “We’re a small city, and our police force does a great job.”

The Main Street DIY crafts hub Stillwell’s Emporium, decorated for the village’s Mardi Gras parade in February.

Back on the walking tour, the Linders lead the way into a CBD retailer that opened next to the new pizza parlor in January, The Rose & Hemp. Behind the counter, founder Scott Koester says he and his wife, with a baby on the way, traded a 1,250-square-foot East Lake bungalow for a house they bought more than three times that size outside the village’s limits. He plans to live there for decades.

Koester was easily sold on the business location, he says, after parking across the street one day—in a lot where a free, open-container Friday music series, Tunes by the Tracks, will happen again this spring—and taking one look at Main Street’s bones.

“I can’t speak to the past, because I don’t know, I haven’t been here,” says Koester. “But it seems like a lot of people are coming together, to work together and make this a place people want to come.”

Directly above the shop, Lauren Godfrey and Ebonee Thompson, two friends and tech-company coworkers, are putting the finishing touches on the city’s first large coworking space, C3 Village, a sort of warmer WeWork with endearingly creaky floors and a lounge designed to resemble a Friends set. Like the brewers, CBD entrepreneur, and many others, they spoke of building a village of business allies and not competitors, each boat rising with a tide.

“Look, I’m a black girl from Florida, she’s a white girl from Georgia, and I think that it speaks to the story that people from completely different backgrounds can come together and create something so magical, something so passionate,” says Thompson, whose background in tourism has also landed her a deal to run the city’s new social media campaign. “That speaks volumes to what this community can do.”

Thompson and Godfrey, in the circa-1940 space they’ve renovated themselves into a coworking hub.

The upswing

As part of the city’s refined pitch to more investors, Peterson says the DDA is in the process of tabulating how much private investment—hundreds of thousands, at least—Stone Mountain has recently seen.

In January, the city inked a $155,000 contract with Atlanta architecture and engineering firm Pond to create a new downtown masterplan. Expected to be ready by August, the plan will aim to boost village esthetics and channel area visitors in from main arteries (by way of enhanced signage, as a starting point). Changes could also include additional bike lanes and green space meant to build off cyclist traffic that the popular PATH trail brings. A current city motto—“Atlanta’s Mountain Town”—is destined for the Dumpster, Peterson says.

Beyond the buildouts for forthcoming businesses, the makings of a buzzy, urban-style place are already here, headed by a diverse set of proprietors: a bike shop, arts center, theater, makers studio, antique shops, health store, new coffee house Gilly Brew Bar, event center and music studio 5380 Studios, a pie shop, and longstanding eateries like Public House, Sweet Potato Cafe (in a funky bungalow off Main Street), and the stalwart Wells Cargo Cafe.

Gilly’s coffee house occupies the 1834 former home of Stone Mountain’s first mayor, where both Union and Confederate casualties were hospitalized during the Civil War. A new restaurant is also planned.

“I mean, Stone Mountain is one of the largest attractions in the Southeast,” says Gilly barista Ivan Solis. “It’s kind of crazy how many people go there, but don’t come here. It’s kind of weird.”

Around the corner from the brewery in a circa-1900 brick building, however, could be the most-hyped new attraction on the walking tour: 13th Colony BBQ, a venture by Stone Mountain native Jonathan Hartnett of Decatur’s Las Brasas. That’s expected to open in April, on the corner opposite Stoned Pizza Kitchen, lending another commercial jolt to the village’s nucleic intersection.

“People love to see old historic buildings from the early 1900s repurposed,” says David Downs, a Realtor with Keller Knapp Realty, who fell for the village during group cycling rides from Decatur—and who’s bought and renovated three Main Street buildings in recent years. “You can’t build history.”

Housing outlook

As a tangerine sunset flares over the pines, the walking tour concludes at a development called Hearthstone Park that could lend a glimpse at Stone Mountain Village’s residential future—where the Linders both own a home and, as real estate agents, are actively selling others.

Jelani, who’s been a village resident and homeowner since 2006, says Hearthstone marks the city’s first new housing development in nearly 20 years. Thirty-four standalone houses are planned around a central park, each with three bedrooms and mountain views. A starting price of $285,000 buys 1,500 square feet and change, while the $350,000 range gets a finished basement and 2,400 square feet.

“This is a half-million dollar product intown, at least,” Jelani notes in the model unit’s living room. “It’s something for people getting pushed out, or empty-nesters.”

For existing housing stock, Neighborhood Scout pegs the median Stone Mountain home value at just $127,724, with a majority built between 1970 and 1999. Per recent sales records, the low $200,000s buys a livable three-bedroom, midcentury bungalow within a few blocks of the village.

But the renovated classics near Main Street are harder to come by, often trading by word of mouth before listing. “When older homes do come on the market,” says Shani, “they go like that—snap!”

Census estimates show the city’s population has inched up by less than 500 people since 2010. And Jelani says infill opportunities in city limits are limited. So one can’t help but wonder, should the droves come seeking relatively affordable housing in a unique, walkable, outdoorsy setting—amidst a metro expected to ballon with 3 million more people by 2050—where they all might fit.

But that’s a matter for another, more sober day.

It being Friday night, the Public House—the village’s de facto Cheers—comes alive with clinking glasses, ragtime music, and karaoke crowds. In the back, huddled around a booth, Webb the co-owner describes how the village retains an overtly friendly, come-on-over southernness without the yesteryear stigma. He points to a crowd that’s diverse—and by all indications, defiantly proud of it.

“You either fall in love with the village, or you don’t,” says Webb. “And if you do, you got to live here. It’s the best hidden gem in Georgia.”

From the mountain’s summit, with downtown and Midtown Atlanta beyond, and the village below.

source https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/2/28/21128454/stone-mountain-village-park-atlanta-restaurants-brewery-main-street

#OliverAtlanta

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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Hey! First off I love your blog! Second, I say you have a problem or don’t understand why people don’t like Mary and I saw this post pop up on my dash http://justjensenanddean.tumblr.com/post/163320319227/thejabberwock-in-the-beginning-403-i-think. And I think this might explain why. There is such a disconnect between the Mary we got to meet in earlier seasons and the Mary now that goes beyond the “she feels disconnected from being dead for 30 years”. It’s just a different person altogether.

Third. I don’t think this is the place to say this, but tumblr wouldn’t let me submit a link in the askbox so.

Heya, thanks, @snowslittlesnowflakes :)

I don’t know if it’s just an interpretation/how you were reading it all along thing so I think I’m never going to be able to explain this adequately in words without doing a comprehensive study of people who DIDN’T like Mary to see where they went a different way than me, but I found Mary to have great continuity with herself all season. As I’ve been doing my rewatch I’ve been finding even more reasons to yell about how great a character she is and how well her story works and ties together for me.

One of the things I was wondering, and I don’t follow enough Sam girls to be entirely clear on this to know what their vocal demographic is like, but I have a suspicion based on the wank I’ve seen that some Dean girls dislike her louder. I find Mary’s season 12 arc to be intrinsically linked to Sam, and I was expecting/waiting for that ALREADY before the season kicked off, as like, the no.1 bullet point on my list of urgent Mary things they NEEDED to address. To my eyes the show immediately began to set up and prepare to do exactly what it was going to do to deal with this. It was a gut feeling at the start of season 12 but on rewatching I found exactly what had made me think it:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/161941971596/1x09-she-cant-say-it-here-whether-its-a-ghost

I think it was because immediately in 12x01 they clarified that Mary remembered everything she was supposed to (aka not the time travel nonsense) EXCEPT this. I’m actually not 100% sure people remember being ghosts, since I don’t think Bobby has ever commented on it - or at least if he has it would be a very broad allusion to it, since I know he’s never had a sit down chat about it with anyone :P Anyway, removing it un-did her apology to Sam and that was GOOD because Sam could take that apology back in season 1 on HIS side, but it was no proper and fitting away for an ALIVE Mary who now had to deal with everything to feel like “oh i said i was sorry once when i was a ghost obviously it’s all good now” so SAM was the major cause of Mary leaving and being unable to cope with being around her sons, and this was loudly broadcast in the subtext of 12x01-3 to my eyes and so I was expecting her to leave and I was expecting it to NOT be about Dean, except as a secondary emotional arc from HIS direction towards her.

On top of that, Mary and Dean actually don’t have a point of tension except for the entire underlying trauma and her leaving after 12x03, all of which came from her deal, which was about Sam (ergo, the 12x22 conversation dealing a lot with how Sam was harmed, not Dean, and again, another strike against Mary from people who care about Dean that this conversation seemed not to be about Dean despite how it was to the core because all that Sam stuff directly impacted his life too and he said so and of course he’s rarely if ever felt unconnected from Sam to the point that Sam being hurt isn’t like hurting him too).

So to me it felt like this was a secondary concern to the Sam n Mary stuff, which I was loudly stating at original airing times that I was ready to gobble up and give 100% of my attention to, did so, and therefore took away a completely different reason to be invested in Mary, allowing my Dean girl self to just happily soak up that Dean was having some problems with Mary and that he was going to have an arc of his own with her to make things up with her but the whole POINT was he was being left out and the narrative KNEW it, it wasn’t like the show did any of this forgetfully or maliciously against Dean to deprive him of his mother for no reason - the reason was Sam and that was not between him and Sam and not something I think he fully grasped consciously either, so it was something for ME as the audience to sit on and watch and wait to see how it resolved, and thankfully he and Sam never got into their own fight about it. So I was waiting for it to be resolved but I could see Mary’s discomfort was what she originally stated in 12x02 and not what she told them in 12x03 when leaving. The whole point was she didn’t voice what was ACTUALLY wrong, at least, the core of it, and left instead of dealing with it, having given them a reason they were all utterly helpless to, instead of a reason that Sam could chase after her to deal with with their words and just give her that vindication of her apology she thought she’d never get and - because she doesn’t remember it - never knows she made, putting Sam and an ENORMOUS emotional advantage over her since he already forgave her somewhere between 1x09 and 5x22, when his personal slate was wiped clean. In 12x22 she voices it out loud and it turns out to be fine but you know, if she just SAID it originally...? None of the drama of season 12 would have got past 12x02 :P

(Mary’s revulsion and horror at what she’d done to Sam is also a major emotional subplot of this fic I wrote circa 12x14 and it’s about as subtextual as the way it was being expressed in the show which is why it mostly manifests as Sam wearing flip flops for her and her loathing herself for it) (I include this note because it occurs to me that Sam’s characterisation in that fic probably seems utterly bizarre and extremely unfair on Sam unless you already read it once AND know how I felt about Sam and Mary in season 12, aka that by 12x06 I was sitting on the rooftop yelling about them every time they so much as exchanged a worried glance, and in 12x12 actually screeched out loud in glee about Sam and Mary and the yellow eyes thing and consequently spent the episode reaction time miffed that everyone was more interested in a little matter of the Destiel “I love you” than what I wanted to talk about and so that fic is a reaction to 12x12 and 12x14 at once :P)

ANYWAY I think Mary in season 12 is a substantially different person to any version of her we knew before because the entire point is that we were going to MEET Mary Winchester for the first time outside of dreams and time travel and on the other side of her death.

She remained unbroken up to the opening of 1x01 because as fiesty and sweet as she was as a hunter when she was younger or as housewife-y and settled into a rocky marriage but loving her kids as they eventually managed to convey without rocking the boat too much in 5x16, none of this, even the sad Mary from 5x16, the latest canon version of her we saw before season 1 or 11, is who she would be post-dying and discovering her actions had global consequences and she’d utterly fucked up her sons, SAM IN PARTICULAR, and again I can not stress hard enough how important SAM is in all this, that her horror is about SAM not Dean, and that she’s running away from SAM and that she needs to make it right with SAM.

Dean has a whole other bucket of issues of which the show took a different route to explore and unpack, by prioritising, sensibly, that Mary got maybe 20 seconds to have the “I hecked up” thought on stumbling onto Azazel in the nursery and her death, and I feel like I should repeat this over and over and put in my blog header maybe, the only time we ever see Mary after that is the “I’m sorry” line of dialogue in 1x09. That is her entire chance the show ever gives her to have a voice or to address what she did post-death. And it makes Mary’s post-death character ABOUT this until season 12 (when it... continues to be about this because that’s who she is because that’s the most important thing she feels post-death and 1x09 already confirmed it)... I don’t think what she said in 1x09 EVEN IF SHE REMEMBERED IT, WHICH SHE DOESN’T, is good enough to have Mary back and pretend her deal is forgiven, for Sam’s sake, said out of love for Sam. So the mytharc is about Mary through and through, from the BMoL to the choice to have a nephilim (who is a Sam parallel & hence ending the season with Jack and Sam staring at each other) as the more cosmic mytharc, and yellow eyed demons back, and an AU structured around her deal having never been made that she ends up being punted into with Lucifer, the reason she made it in the first place when looking for ultimate blame (again, something we’ve known since 4x22 and there were hints through the season that she needed a final reckoning with Lucifer).

What we are seeing in season 12 is how that sweet and genuinely inexperienced, dreamy Mary we meet at her YOUNGEST age shown on screen, is like when you scrape together everything - the comments about her unhappy marriage with John, her legacy as a hunter, her fucked up father, her deal, EVERYTHING we know about her, and trying to turn it into a coherent character who has her own agency and inner thoughts and feelings that matter to the narrative, when the narrative previously only EVER produced her as a token to move around for other people’s thoughts and feelings. Even in the time travel episodes, she’s written as emotional manipulation for Dean, not as a character with a fighting chance, because 5x13 in the end wipes her memories clean and makes the very firm point to Mary that she’s gonna shut up, have her babies, and blissfully tell them that “angels are watching over” them when the awful, horrific truth of the Grand Plan has been wiped clean from her brain. I mean, Kelly in the cold open of 12x19 does what Mary was not allowed to do in 5x13 for the sake of the world, and yet is still dragged back to life because the baby is more important than her feelings - and since that’s that Glynn & Bobo episode, I’m assuming that’s a direct criticism on the past narrative, not the show fucking up this thing for once but directly telling us that in these narratives, the mother is meaningless (insert bitterness about Kelly having to survive like 5 Buckleming episodes before anyone wrote her with anything else to say than using her as the vessel for the baby so heavy handed and yet utterly unaware that that was all they were doing with her anyway >.>). The *only* thing that didn’t come up in the narrative except by omission, was the cupids, and they didn’t come up by omission before the title card of 12x01, so I figure they’ve been a part of the entire story all along even if no one said anything, especially with separate references to the angel fall spell to remind us cupids are a thing without pointing at Mary directly.

But all that from her past that we DID know aside, Mary was NEVER a real character before 12x01, in the sense of being allowed motives, forward momentum, or a sense of purpose (and surprise surprise, she barely has one because she’s been so fucked around by the cosmic narrative all she can do is look at it in horror and wonder if there’s a way to make it right so Sam can pick up where he left off and go back to school and Dean doesn’t have to hunt, as John said in 1x20 - She has regressive impression THEIR motivations looking back on her boys, just as we seem to look back on her with regressive ideas about her motivation even though she took her wedding ring off and that too was a powerful motif all season in its appearances and the silence about John and the John mirror in Ketch that she eventually purged herself of). So we can’t say we really knew who she was before (we meet her post-cupid but Toni extracted SHOCKINGLY dark murdery-ness from her and cited it as her Campbell side, and season 6 fills in an emotional blank there, that soulless!Sam happily fit in with them for a year and Samuel only got worried when Sam didn’t understand the concept that baby stew was bad). What she was made to say in the past, narratively, was to make us feel sorry for Dean and Sam because of her and her unknowing tragic request for them not to be raised as hunters. Dean gets so sad he forgets the 2x20 motivation to put saving people over family, and tries to undo history, and ultimately when he can’t, that trauma was part of the lesson Heaven wanted him to take away about his role, same as any other time they manipulated him like in 4x17 or 5x04 or Gabriel tried in 5x08. I used to think 4x03 and 5x13 gave us a chance to meet her but they’re still utterly clamped down in the wider narrative to be a fleeting apology for killing her off and making her stay dead.

Anyway in 4x03 Mary is 19, motivated to get out in a way to parallel her with having Sam’s once innocence about thinking he can escape hunting, and when Dean talks to her, utterly untraumatised except for what you might expect being raised by Samuel. Asking her to be the same person post-death, with her guilt about her deal on her shoulders and 2 adult sons too traumatised about the exact same thing from THEIR end to just open up a fun little dialogue about it, is similarly demanding to keep her trapped in the exact same box, and demanding her to be someone who she realistically would no longer be, and would be demanding her to be a person who would be a poor portrayal of Mary and not taking into consideration every facet of her character, and not allow her to be traumatised or broken or overwhelmed with guilt without also making the demand she shoulder it completely and stoically and continue to try and be a sweet and motherly character because that is the role we may have come to expect of her even though we know Sam and Dean start out bright eyed and bushy tailed and post their death and guilt trauma, are angrier, harder men... And despite the fact the opening run of episodes of season 12 made it very clear it was completely unrealistic to expect Mary to cut the crusts off the sandwiches of her boys and drop back into their lives only to immediately fill an emotional void THEY had instead of wondering how SHE would feel.

Allowing Mary to be selfish and leave and to show her brokenness on screen was utterly fantastic and whatever else you could complain about season 12, I’m 110% here for Mary and the arc they chose to give her because it was POWERFUL and EMPOWERING and they let her messy cry and kill things and do like 8 of Sam and Dean (and Cas)’s own personal selfish, misguided or murdery arcs for herself and at the end she was forgiven, got a group hug, and rewarded with being allowed to ask if she could punch Lucifer in the face and having that wish immediately granted, since she had some catharsis left to get which her boys couldn’t give her, namely going back to the root of her problems and knocking some teeth out :P

I mean, feeling like Mary wasn’t sweet enough is a mysterious complaint to me because I have been rooting for her every step of the way DEMANDING she be ugly and horrible and cold if she needs to be because I WANTED to see the image of Mother Mary utterly torn down and for it to be stomped out, and for her to do the stomping, on Sam and Dean’s faces if necessary, because for ALL of them it would be better in the end not to think she was supposed to be sweet and caring and motherly if she comes back as a REAL character and NOT as an idol.

Like, I get that you could think in 4x03 that was supposed to be telling us that was a character trait of hers and when you’re scraping for crumbs of a character who we get nothing about except these scant little episodes, you might try and stake the entire reading of her on these details, but in the same episode she also was snarky, Dean-like, a more than competent fighter, and tbh before you know about the cupids, just in 4x03′s context, I wondered if she was only latching onto John because he’d get her out of hunting, and it was a manipulative move in a way where of course she liked him and picked a guy she had some feelings for but at the end of the day it was about her rebellion against Samuel and her desire to be free - Azazel offers her peace in the suburbs when he brings John back and his words are not so much about their love but how Mary’s quality of life increases. And once you know about the cupids it just means she’s irrationally in love and staking her idea of that future all on one guy like no one else can do it for her, but she still has ulterior motives, that she wasn’t going to marry John and teach him to be a hunter and JUST want to propagate her bloodline like a good little meaningless walking womb in the grander scheme of things and it didn’t matter in what circumstances she did that.

And since 1x09 and that “I’m sorry” they’ve been trying to TELL us that Mary is messed up and complicated and did bad things and WON’T be so sweet as they think. Again in 2x22. And in 4x03 they reveal that it was this deal, but they still chose to make her a hunter and give her that legacy, and not be led into the deal blind, like some people we see who have no idea what a demon deal meant for them. And that DOES make her deal more fucked up and people who are critical of Mary and have been for a long time, much longer than season 12, have been critical because of the fact she should have known better or should have taken better precautions (thanks again to 12x12 for confirming said precautions were useless and allowing us to headcanon she absolutely did but Azazel strolled right over them anyway, since until that point all we knew was that holy water didn’t work on him).

So... anyway, idk. I wanted to meet the fucked up Mary the show had been promising us since the start, and they introduced the fucked up Mary I wanted to see. And I was delighted. And that’s the backstory behind that dotpost >.>

Re: what I actually said before, though...

Idk if you just saw the post of mine that went outside this blog and lost all the context because of my actual complaint being dotposted (the previous day as well) to avoid drama and because I was mostly grumbling to myself in the tags - idk if you saw that or just some snarky replies where I gave 1 line answers before diving back into the tags for cover, because that got reblogged without any of the context of what I was saying. :P

There’s some perfectly valid complaints about Mary and why people didn’t like her with some self reflection that I’m never going to disagree with even if I personally enjoyed Mary’s arc and had already mentally boxed away a large allowance for the show to suck at telling its own story in a narrative structure way, within its rigid formula, probably because I’ve had to forgive that complaint to enjoy Cas’s part in the story all this time as well and I am a season 10 bitter fan in that respect for Cas, so nothing can suck as hard as “I brought snacks” as his grand total contribution to an episode :P

I was mostly grumbling about the people who specifically disliked season 12 as the MAJOR part of their complaint and that it made no sense, or that everyone was OOC, but then also as an aside, noting that they hadn’t made any attempt to sympathise with Mary and had immediately dismissed her as poorly written. In that case I understand perfectly why they dislike season 12, because sympathy towards Mary and pretty much swapping loyalties from your normal character stanning to Mary as your fave this year (as the show itself did by prioritising her and Cas’s arcs (and even Crowley’s or even Rowena’s to an extent for the sake of killing them off with a bit of fanfare, although, see also grumbling about 12x13 as the worst send off episode ever))... I think it’s important to go for that change in perspective and not judge how it looks on the surface but ask what feelings they’re trying to express by showing these things, in both the similarities AND differences, and ASSUMING the show is competent and did its research when the evidence is clearly there they did and are referencing every event in her life as much as possible, and therefore changes are made with intent to tell us more about her and to reveal new things rather than fuck up old canon. This would go a long way to explaining her arc, and therefore towards making a chunk more of season 12 make sense. And it was a semi-personal comment, aimed at a rather small, loud group of bloggers hence keeping it in the dotposts to myself with no major tags >.>

So, apologies, I’m only making this so lengthy and clear because of the inevitable way misunderstandings happen on Tumblr and I’ve been bothered for days about that post being reblogged without my tags or at least, I reblogged it w/o tags to be sarcastic but since it was all out of context, once it got reblogged, no one would know my tags were there any more vs seeing it all on my blog in the correct place.

Also, like I said, I have no clue if the hating Mary contingent is more weighed towards Dean girls and the fact I related to her pain through Sam while watching Dean take the brunt of her ~rejection~ was something I was chill to weather because I figured it would work out because no way would they under-value Dean’s literal most important relationship on the show, more important than Cas and Sam TOGETHER, and lo and behold 12x22 delivered in spades the mother & son bonding episode I knew I’d get if I held my horses and let them utterly destroy that bond to build it back up. I don’t know if Sam girls have similar issues with Mary but from their own perception of how she hurt Sam, or if they interpret her leaving because Dean was too clingy (surface text of 12x02 & 3) or what. Or if they’re as content as I was to see how the “I hurt you i fucked up i fucked up” arc from Mary to Sam would take them so far as I was happy to go to let the Dean and Mary thing unfold because again, it’s the most important thing in the entire show’s backstory, and 12x23′s AU showed that again, by going to ridiculous lengths to validate what Mary’s deal brought about in the main world, but only AFTER she could look Sam in the eye.

I mean I don’t wanna say I have some magical understanding of season 12 that others lack in general, I just think there are a (few) loud angry bloggers who spent a lot of time yelling at Mary for not being what they wanted, and consequently took everything she did as a personal offence towards their interpretation and had an enormous chip on their shoulder towards the season, whereas @awed-frog‘s self-exploration on the point comes to a completely different conclusion of why Mary’s arc didn’t work for them and it’s a structural fault with the show that made it so frustrating and hard to get to grips with when the emotional telling should have been more upfront to work for them. (I also don’t wanna say their reason is the only good reason to have not got along with Mary in season 12 because there’s surely others, but it makes a lot of sense to me as a reason with little to do with relative amounts of offered sympathy and therefore nothing to do with what I was complaining about so a good example untainted by my specific wank :P)

(and this is why this was all snarky short dotposting >.>)

Anyway standard disclaimer that I’m obviously a Dean girl and I love him dearly, but in this particular case I got in hot water with anons etc all season because I didn’t feel like Mary needed to be punished for hurting Dean (I went past a past like that while looking for some of the things I linked), nor that Dean’s hurt was more important than her pain, and consequentially watched the non-Destiel Dean girls I followed wander down a path I couldn’t go with them because their very own selfsame enthusiasm about Dean and Mary in PREVIOUS seasons had made me so utterly hyped to see her again, given me the appropriate emotional groundwork to prepare for what was about to happen, and... I mean the only thing I’m baffled about is why I had to unfollow so many people with tears streaming down my face because I admired them so much once, but their protectiveness of Dean won the coin toss and they loathed Mary and season 12 so much it just became a well of bitterness. I’m still sad that it was this issue that made me unfollow some bloggers I’ve followed since I got to tumblr, because they just hated Mary and season 12 so MUCH. And I remember reading posts valuing Mary so highly from them, back when she was an idol of Dean’s and nothing more. (Again: general impression, naming no names.)

And like... the ENTIRE SHOW since 1x01, we’ve seen that Dean did not have a healthy emotional distance about Mary, when Sam says she’s not coming back, and ironic as it is that it’s this context, Dean slams Sam against the bridge and is like DON’T YOU EVER TALK ABOUT MOM LIKE THAT and it’s not that that’s ruined that she came back - that line is betraying that Dean can’t even think about her being DEAD and the LOSS he took because she’s so utterly tragically romanticised in his head that *pointing out that she’s dead* is an *insult to her memory* and yeah he’s traumatised and Sam doesn’t remember or whatever, but bringing her back is literally proving Dean wrong not that there was a reason to hope she’d come back because I think at that point he could have NO reasonable expectation to argue with Sam like, WELL SHE MIGHT SOME DAY because that’s not the point. The point was he couldn’t think clearly about who she was or what she meant because it HURT and even before he found out about her deal in 4x03 and swallowed THAT down like a champ, he couldn’t allow himself a SINGLE mixed feeling about her. She HAD to be perfect and venerated.

Well that all went out of control for him, but “I hate you” is the single most important thing Dean has ever said on the show, followed by realising he can hate AND love Mary because she is a complex, fucked up human being who hurt him and THAT was laid down in the first 15 minutes of the show as something he couldn’t overcome. Because Mary wasn’t ever coming back. And then she did. And now he’s overcome it. And I cry about 12x22 just about every day. But anyway. I see Mary hurting Dean as the most essential thing that’s happened to him and as a Dean girl it utterly delighted me to watch his heart shatter in real time on screen over and over.

And yet others saw it as long over due rejection from Dean to Mary in 12x22 like within a season they’d grown to hate her so much they just wanted Dean to say “I hate you” and leave and go take a self-care weekend in the woods and maybe grow a beard and never come home and leave his entire family to fuck themselves about how they treated him, but that was all taken away from them so then they got on with loathing that he made it all about Sam and then forgave her and wanted to reconcile with these assholes instead. :P

And meanwhile the more I rewatch the older seasons the more I move 12x22 from “one of the best episodes of the show” to “actually the best thing to ever happen to this show” and “wtf everyone got character development for the first time since the apocalypse” and I’m over the moon.

And also love Mary a lot. >.>

#Asks #wank for ts #Mary F Winchester #I KNOW this is an emotional disconnect that starts waaaay back and all #I was just bummed at the time of dotposting #because I saw Mary come back in 11x23 and was like #WELP BETTER DO MY BEST TO LOVE AND UNDERSTAND HER SO I DON'T FALL INTO THAT TRAP #and then had one of the most fascinating and engaging media experiences ever as a result #12x22 #I wanted to link basically every post about mary I've made since season 12 but I stopped myself :P #my rewatch this hiatus has involved a LOT of lengthy posts exploring her and why I feel she and her arc are totally integrated #and that she makes perfect sense as a character and season 12 shines an ever brighter light on that in the past #and draws seamlessly for its continuation and ongoing exploration of her #but short of making a Mary Meta Masterpost I decided to chill with linking my entire blog :P #ugh anyway this rant is not aimed at you snowflakes #I appreciate you trying to explain but in the context of the original post I knew exactly what I was annoyed about :P #and was just trying NOT to make a long rambly post about it for the sake of being a wank light blog #aaaah well maybe it's better to just say it and move on >.>#submission

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dramioneasks · 7 years

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“Forgotten” Authors

So I just posted a list of popular Dramione authors and their most popular fics for a new ship member, and mentioned that I would make a separate post for few popular fics with authors who are not as popular. The problem with recommending fics that are popular is that when DramioneAsks recommends any fic, people go read it, and like it, and favorite/follow/review it, and then it only increases the fic’s popularity, causing us to recommend the same “Most Popular” fics over-and-over again.

So here I am adding a list of authors who may not be current in the fandom anymore, but who wrote some popular fics (that are at least 5 years old) that we love to read and share. I encourage you to check out the other fics of these authors.

Also, make sure to check out new fics regularly (we post them from our queue daily), and remember to favorite, follow and review fics as your read them, so that you can help your favorite new authors join the “popular club.” You can also help by submitting recommendations of newer fanfiction for us to share with others.

-Shirlyn

Simply Irresistable by bookworm1993 - T, 30 chapters (circa 2009) - Draco gave a cocky grin. "I am going to give you a makeover." "I'm sorry what?" "You heard me Granger, I'm going to give you a makeover that will make every man want you,and make Weasley die of regret. You will be simply irresistible."

Turncoat by elizaye - M, 101 chapters (circa 2011) - Switching sides. "I have only one condition, and I trust it won't be hard for you to meet. I want Granger."

We Learned the Sea by luckei1 - T, 37 chapters (circa 2006) - Draco Malfoy turns himself in after a very successful career as a Death Eater, then enlists Harry and Hermione to help him in a scheme to bring down the Dark Lord. DHr. A story of forgiveness.

Hermione Malfoy by superscar - M, 20 chapters (circa 2003) - At the request of Dumbledore, Hermione Granger marries Draco Malfoy.

The Nietzsche Classes by Beringae - M, 15 chapters (circa 2005) - The Ministry takes action against the remaining prejudice in the wizarding society and asks Hermione for help. “What do you want? Money? Power? Name your price, Granger. I’m not about to let pride get in my way when an Azkaban sentence is on the line.”

Parenting Class by IcyPanther - T, 38 chapters (circa 2004) - Sixth years at Hogwarts are now required to take a parenting class, what fun! Hermione, Draco, and Harry are paired up in which they'll trade off being children. Can they live through the class or will being a parent prove too hard?

Valentine Encounter by Kyra4 - M, 24 chapters (circa 2004) - Draco and Hermione are Head Boy & Girl, but do NOT share a common room and see as little of each other as possible til a fateful encounter on Valentine's night leads to a gradual, reluctant romance. Starts 7th year goes postHogwarts.

Aurelian by BittyBlueEyes - T, 43 chapters (circa 2010) - Two years after the war, a young stranger pays a visit to the burrow. His arrival alone is baffling, but the news he brings of an upcoming war turns the world upside down. Hermione's quiet, post-war life will never be the same.

Linked by Philyra912 - T, 24 chapters (circa 2005) - When a Potions assignment has a rare and disturbing side effect on Draco and Hermione, they will learn more about each other than they ever wanted to know.

The Dragon’s Bride by Rizzle - M, 61 chapters (circa 2009) - Draco & Hermione awaken in a Muggle hotel room, naked, hung-over and tattooed. They also happen to be married. Thus begin a desperate search for a solution to their sticky situation.

What the Room Requires by Alydia Rackham - T, 26 chapters (circa 2010) - Hermione is the one who finds Draco weeping in the bathroom. He flees. She chases him into the Room of Requirement, and the room forces them to face their greatest fears together in order to find the door.

In the Arms of Her Dragon by Wolf Blossom - M, WIP, 28 chapters (circa 2012) - "Why're you crying?" Draco whispered, sitting down beside Hermione in a deserted Great Hall. Looking up at him with puffy eyes, she admitted what happened earlier at the Gryffindor Tower. Without a moment's hesitation, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and said: "Come on, you're spending the night in the Slytherin dungeon. With me."

Mine by Curiositykils - M, Abandoned, 29 chapters (circa 2012) - Veela Fic set Ten Years after the War. Draco is a Veela. Hermione isn't his Healer. She's just his.

Reverse by Lady Moonglow - M, Abandoned?, 45 chapters (circa 2008) - Hermione is unexpectedly swept into a dystopian world of opposites where Dumbledore reigns as Dark Lord and Muggle technology and the Dark Arts have revolutionized Britain. A Light wizard resistance led by Tom Riddle and the Malfoys has been left to a nightmarish fate. Can Hermione, posing as her darker incarnation, help save a world more shattered than her own?

The Prank War by CrazyGirl47 - T, Abandoned, 45 chapters (circa 2004) - Now that Voldemort is dead, Harry and company are enjoying their last year of school by taking part in a timehonored Hogwarts tradition: the seventh year prank war.

Claiming Hermione by ilke - M, Abandoned, 33 chapters (circa 2008) - “This doesn’t change anything, Granger. We’re not friends.” Draco said. “I know.” Hermione sat unmoving, listening to his retreating footfalls. She felt pretty certain that, in fact, it changed everything.

Why We Fight by Zephyr Seraphim - T, WIP, 48 chapters (circa 2004) - An accident in Potions sends Draco and Hermione to the past where they meet a couple much like them.

The Pitfall by bentnotbroken - M, WIP, 31 chapters (circa 2011) - "I...I love Ron." His lips brushed against her ear as he breathed softly, "Then tell me to stop." They thought the war was over. Little did they know it was only just beginning.

Scales and a Tail by Halfling - M, Abandoned, 23 chapters (circa 2005) - The Scales is a secret Slytherin society within Hogwarts. Its male only policy must change for an upcoming event, and Draco grudgingly recruits Hermione. This choice contributes to something more important than imagined.

The Ten Labors of Draco and Hermione by evilrabidplotbunnies - T, Abandoned, 49 chapters (circa 2005) - THIS STORY IS DANGEROUS. IT HAS CAUSED NUMEROUS PEOPLE TO BE KICKED OUT OF LIBRARIES, RECEIVE STRANGE LOOKS FROM FAMILY MEMBERS, AND GO CLINICALLY INSANE. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, READ THIS STORY. ESPECIALLY NOT CHAPTER 19.

#most popular dramione #tbr list

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plug2game-blog · 5 years

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We keep in mind the Sega Dreamcast, 20 years on - CNET

Disney World thing, seeing the last gasps of 1990s interactive games, and there it was. That Sonic Experience demo with the whale chase-- incredible to enjoy and dreadful to play.I wouldn't spend any quality time with the Dreamcast up until at least a year later on, however seeing that display was impressive for the time. At that point I still simply had a Genesis, so even a short glance of Sonic looking halfway-decent in 3D was a discovery. And no, Sonic 3D Blast does not count. Though I never purchased one myself, a buddy did, and it ended up being the go-to console for sleepovers and lost Saturdays. The mix of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Power

Stone, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 which dreadful Chao Garden function from Sonic Experience 2 was more than enough to keep us playing that Dreamcast until long after it had actually died and everyone else carried on. Plus, its huge controllers were still better than the dreadful DualShock 2 on the PlayStation 2. That's simply a fact. Now playing: See this: Remembering the Sega Dreamcast at 20 Scott Stein I had every Sega system that was ever made. Yes, even the 32X. I was a Sega kid-- the Master System with Superscope 3D glasses was

my present after getting appendicitis. While the Genesis was my preferred, the Dreamcast is a place of special memories I

was residing in

LA, working as a script reader and story editor, and playing amazing NFL 2K video games to get in touch with my inactive sensations about the New york city Jets. That NFL 2K game stunned me ... it was the first TV-real sports game I 'd ever seen. Crazy Taxi was my LA commuting treatment. I loved the weirdness of Chu Rocket. And much more, I was obsessed with Seafarer. My very first E3 I ever attended had the Dreamcast, and I saw the Leonard Nimoy-voiced fish-man in all its Lynchian scary. Seaman was so ahead of its time: It had a microphone I might talk to Seaman with. It resembled if Alexa were a depressed cannibal fish. In my dusty little Sherman Oaks house, Seamanwas my

mystic surrealist fish tank. In addition to the Museum of Jurassic Innovation in Culver City, it was part of my cabinet of curiosities that made me imagine how weird art might be. Area Channel 5, the remarkably real-feeling Shenmue, and yes, I owned Typing of the Dead. It was a great system of video gaming oddities.The Dreamcast was little and magnificently developed, had arcade-perfect games, and was my first real online gaming system.

May it rest in peace in my mom's basement.Rez Infinite is a modernized variation of the Dreamcast classic. Other than the graphics, very little else was changed. Dan Ackerman The Dreamcast was

the first console launch I ever covered as a beginner "video games journalist" at the long-forgotten (however pioneering!) games-and-culture site UGO.com. My colleagues and I all spent for launch day bundles, and Soul Calibur was everybody's instant favorite.We all wound up playing a great deal of meeting room Soul Calibur with UGO's most well-known staff member, previous kid star Gary Coleman. Gary was a total fiend for Soul Calibur, and frequently held court in our Park Opportunity office, taking on all challengers and giving unlimited foul-mouthed garbage talk. He was really pretty excellent, and probably had an 8 out of 10 win ratio.Other early Dreamcast highlights for me consisted of Power Stone, Shenmue, a Local Evil knockoff

called Blue Stinger( I bet I'm the just one considering that a shoutout), and bizarre fish simulator Seaman. When my now-wife utilized the Dreamcast microphone accessory to inform Seaman she was going to consume him, he replied," Or maybe I'm going to eat you." If that's not next-gen, I don't know what is.I've come back to the Dreamcast a couple of times because its 2001 discontinuation, discussing it on my old talking head video game web series Play Worth( circa 2006), and taking a deeper dive for the Dreamcast's 10th anniversary, which I blogged about here. Would I buy a brand-new

" Dreamcast Classic "micro console? Definitely. Would I plug it in more than as soon as or twice? Probably not.Tim Stevens My Dreamcast memories are a little different than the majority of. Like Scott I was a Sega kid and, like Scott, I too owned( and still own) every Sega system. But my memories of the Dreamcast weren't a lot about video gaming as they were about coding. Lots and lots and great deals of coding.I was in college studying computer science and

composing when the Dreamcast dropped, and my dream was to combine those passions and get a gig in the videogame market after graduation. It was time to select a senior thesis, therefore I blindly emailed some folks at Sega to see if there was any way I might get consent to write a simple game for their hot new console.Amazingly, I got an action. As it turns out I would not be allowed to

develop anything for the Dreamcast-- the advancement hardware alone cost thousands of dollars and I was lucky if I might manage pizza on Friday night-- but I was admitted to the Visual Memory Unit designer package. The VMU, you might keep in mind, was the small, Game Boy-looking thing that slotted into the controller. It had a small, gray and black LCD, a four-way D-pad and a number of buttons.Games for the VMU were written in assembler, an arcane language I 'd never ever been exposed to in my research studies. If that weren't daunting enough, the

only documentation for the VMU package remained in Japanese, another language I didn't speak. In spite of all that I figured it out over the list below few months, then labored and labored and toiled to compose what would be the first-- and to my understanding only-- multiplayer VMU video game. You could, you see, connect two of the mini handhelds together at the top thanks to a cunning, reversible connector. I composed a Pong-like video game played vertically, with the ball taking a trip from one screen to the next, back and forth. Establishing that game, plus another simple, Simon-like video game, consumed my senior year at school. The resulting code, when printed out for my final thesis discussion,

filled a binder as big as a phone book. Along the method I learned enough about the game development market to recognize it wasn't for me, however that project, just me and my text editor toiling for months, is still the programming task I look back upon a lot of fondly. The recently remastered version of Shenmue. Jeff Bakalar I was 17 when the Dreamcast released and was working for a dotcom start-up run by 3 21-year-olds. I remember the day it went on sale

, among the partners bought it for same-day shipment

from a service called UrbanFetch.It showed up and we didn't do any work for the rest of the day. It was just nonstop Ready 2 Rumble. I recall being instantly pleased with how crisp the visuals were. It was a level of fidelity I hadn't ever seen before. Whatever appeared so fast, so innovative

, so futuristic. The Dreamcast showed up in between the other console cycles, so it seemed like we were getting a really early glance into what the remainder of the competitors would quickly be providing. I didn't end up owning my own

Dreamcast till college, however I ultimately fell for Sonic Adventure, problems and all. I played many of the Burial place Raider and Local Evil video games on the Dreamcast too. The Dreamcast will always have a place in my heart for its ridiculous memory card adapters, its primarily horrible controller and the outrageous speed at which its disc reader would spin and change, like some type of dot-matrix printer that went off the rails.Jason Parker I never ever actually owned a Dreamcast, but for a duration in my life, I could not

get enough of one video game: Fighting Vipers 2. It was while I remained in college and among my good friends had a Dreamcast, so when we were not out in the evening or studying, we 'd invest hours fighting match after match.The funny thing is, it wasn't called Fighting Vipers 2 as far as I knew at that time.

My buddy had a

bootlegged copy on a disc and whatever composed on the sleeve remained in Japanese, as was all the on-screen text in the game. I even had to count on him to launch video games because I couldn't navigate the menus. At the time, he discussed the video game wasn't offered in the States, however it didn't officially pertained to Dreamcast till 2001 and never in the United States. Now playing: Enjoy this: Our most cherished video game memories. 8:00 Once he started a match, it was button-mashing paradise. I remember being blown away at the crisp 3D graphics and cool-looking fighters at that time. But the best mechanic of all, and most likely the greatest factor I loved the game, was that you might kick your challenger through the wall of the arena at the end of the match. Possibly that sounds ridiculous, but fighting games in between good friends can get tense. When you can send your pal through the wall at the end of a long fight it's an exclamation point like no other. We

'd get significant about it too, shouting" Boooooooom!" as we 'd blast the other person about 50 lawns beyond the cage. No, I didn't own a Dreamcast, due to the fact that I was a poor college student, however I still have

fond memories of stomping out my good friend in Great Buddy 2Battling" You're going through the wall! "Jet Set Radio on the PC, running at 2,560 x1,440 pixels with mostly the very same possessions as the original, still looks terrific. Sean Keane The Dreamcast was the most amazing console I never owned. Games like Homeowner Evil: Code Veronica,

Sonic Adventure and the mighty Shenmue, and functions like online video gaming and the VMU made me want one terribly, however I simply couldn't manage it as a 12-year-old. Code Veronica looked unbelievable

at the time of its release-- replacing fixed prerendered environments with completely 3D ones and bringing n't rather satisfied ... but it's fine. I'm fine.Sonic Experience appeared like an extraordinary growth of Sega's mascot into 3D, even if it's misery to play today. That whale chase looked fantastic

at the time and it seemed the obvious advance for Sonic after Mario's wonderful transition into 3D. Shenmue was the big one however-- a remarkable life simulator with an abundant open world that was extraordinary. Seeing Ryo Hazuki wandering around Yokosuka, Japan, as he tries to unravel the secret of his daddy's murder was remarkable, and something I just got to experience fully through the current remaster. Eric Franklin I bought the original Japanese Dreamcast from

" http://www.ncsx.com/" target =" _ blank" data-component=" externalLink" rel=" noopener" > NCSX back in November 1998 and got 2 video games: Pen Trilcelon and Virtua Fighter 3tb. While Pen Pen was and still is dreadful, VF3 was anything however! Why did I pay a premium to have this system imported? I was a Sega fanboy and the Dreamcast was where I might continue playing Sega video games beyond the defunct Sega Saturn. But as much as I enjoyed playing the Dreamcast, recalling now, it's clear to me what it truly represented for me: A last possibility at console success for Sega. I got a Sega Master System in 1987 and from then through the end of the Dreamcast's life I was not just bought playing Sega video games, however also extremely invested-- emotionally, to be sure-- in Sega's success as a console designer. It's most likely unusual for people to comprehend

that, however here's the way I saw it: The more effective Sega's consoles were, the more terrific Sega games the company would make. I not only wished to play those video games, however to likewise have other people discover how excellent they were. To see in them what I saw in them: Games with great graphics and simple gameplay that belied a depth you had to reveal. You could play Crazy Taxi like a normal individual,

sure. But if you didn't use the Crazy Dash and the Crazy Stop, which allowed you to go from 0 to 60 in less than a second and quickly stop, then you weren't playing it right. That desire and require for the Dreamcast to be successful was genuine.

Even at the time I knew that if the Dreamcast didn't offer a particular variety of systems, Sega would likely leave the hardware company, which the business eventually did. And the anticipation of each brand-new big release was addictive for me. It was less about how much

I would like Shenmue and more about whether it would push enough mainstream audience buttons to make people purchase a Dreamcast over a PS2. It's ridiculous to think of now, however that was me. I think I simply required something to distract me from my genuine life at the time. For a couple of strong years, it was the

Dreamcast. Presents for the player who has

everything: Please that hard-to-shop-for PC player in your life. CNET's Vacation Present Guide: The very best tech gifts for 2018.

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goarticletec-blog · 5 years

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We remember the Sega Dreamcast, 20 years on

New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/we-remember-the-sega-dreamcast-20-years-on/

We remember the Sega Dreamcast, 20 years on

The Dreamcast itself was pretty compact, but that controller! What a chunker.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

The Sega Dreamcast launched in Japan 20 years ago on Nov. 27, 1998. The system enjoyed a brief but memorable time in the limelight with some truly fantastic games and a few features that would inspire future consoles — it was the first console with built-in internet.

But ultimately a lack of third-party support, a somewhat underpowered architecture and the fact that the rival PlayStation 2 could play DVDs as well as games would mean a premature demise. None of that will stop us from remembering it fondly — or wishing for a Dreamcast Classic.

Morgan Little

I was in fifth grade, visiting a DisneyQuest while doing the whole Disney World thing, seeing the last gasps of 1990s interactive arcades, and there it was. That Sonic Adventure demo with the whale chase — amazing to watch and awful to play.

I wouldn’t spend any quality time with the Dreamcast until at least a year later, but seeing that showcase was astounding for the time. At that point I still just had a Genesis, so even a brief glimpse of Sonic looking halfway-decent in 3D was a revelation. And no, Sonic 3D Blast doesn’t count.

Though I never bought one myself, a good friend did, and it became the go-to console for sleepovers and wasted Saturdays. The mix of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Power Stone, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 and that terrible Chao Garden feature from Sonic Adventure 2 was more than enough to keep us playing that Dreamcast until long after it had died and everyone else moved on. Plus, its giant controllers were still better than the awful DualShock 2 on the PlayStation 2. That’s just a fact.

Now playing: Watch this: Remembering the Sega Dreamcast at 20

5:49

Scott Stein

I had every Sega system that was ever made. Yes, even the 32X. I was a Sega kid — the Master System with Superscope 3D glasses was my gift after getting appendicitis. While the Genesis was my favorite, the Dreamcast is a place of special memories. I was living in LA, working as a script reader and story editor, and playing amazing NFL 2K games to connect with my dormant feelings about the New York Jets. That NFL 2K game stunned me… it was the first TV-real sports game I’d ever seen. Crazy Taxi was my LA commuting therapy. I loved the weirdness of Chu Chu Rocket. And even more, I was obsessed with Seaman.

My first E3 I ever attended had the Dreamcast, and I saw the Leonard Nimoy-voiced fish-man in all its Lynchian horror. Seaman was so ahead of its time: It had a microphone I could speak to Seaman with. It was like if Alexa were a depressed cannibal fish. In my dusty little Sherman Oaks apartment, Seaman was my mystic surrealist aquarium. Along with the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, it was part of my cabinet of curiosities that made me dream of how strange art could be. Space Channel 5, the insanely real-feeling Shenmue, and yes, I owned Typing of the Dead. It was a great system of gaming oddities.

The Dreamcast was small and beautifully designed, had arcade-perfect games, and was my first real online gaming system. May it rest in peace in my mom’s basement.

Rez Infinite is a modernized version of the Dreamcast classic. Other than the graphics, not much else was changed.

GameSpot

Dan Ackerman

The Dreamcast was the first console launch I ever covered as a novice “games journalist” at the long-forgotten (but pioneering!) games-and-culture website UGO.com. My colleagues and I all shelled out for launch day bundles, and Soul Calibur was everyone’s instant favorite.

We all ended up playing a lot of conference room Soul Calibur with UGO’s most famous employee, former child star Gary Coleman. Gary was a total fiend for Soul Calibur, and regularly held court in our Park Avenue office, taking on all challengers and dispensing endless foul-mouthed trash talk. He was actually pretty good, and probably had an 8 out of 10 win ratio.

Other early Dreamcast highlights for me included Power Stone, Shenmue, a Resident Evil knockoff called Blue Stinger (I bet I’m the only one giving that a shoutout), and bizarre fish simulator Seaman. When my now-wife used the Dreamcast microphone attachment to tell Seaman she was going to eat him, he replied, “Or maybe I’m going to eat you.” If that’s not next-gen, I don’t know what is.

I’ve come back to the Dreamcast a few times since its 2001 discontinuation, talking about it on my old talking head video game web series Play Value (circa 2006), and taking a deeper dive for the Dreamcast’s 10th anniversary, which I wrote about here.

Would I buy a new “Dreamcast Classic” micro console? Definitely. Would I plug it in more than once or twice? Probably not.

Tim Stevens

My Dreamcast memories are a little different than most. Like Scott I was a Sega kid and, like Scott, I too owned (and still own) every Sega system. But my memories of the Dreamcast weren’t so much about gaming as they were about coding. Lots and lots and lots of coding.

I was in college studying computer science and writing when the Dreamcast dropped, and my dream was to combine those passions and get a gig in the videogame industry after graduation. It was time to pick a senior thesis, and so I blindly emailed some folks at Sega to see if there was any way I could get permission to write a simple game for their hot new console.

Amazingly, I got a response. As it turns out I would not be allowed to develop anything for the Dreamcast — the development hardware alone cost thousands of dollars and I was lucky if I could afford pizza on Friday night — but I was given access to the Visual Memory Unit developer kit. The VMU, you may remember, was the tiny, Game Boy-looking thing that slotted into the controller. It had a tiny, gray and black LCD, a four-way D-pad and a couple of buttons.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Games for the VMU were written in assembler, an arcane language I’d never been exposed to in my studies. If that weren’t daunting enough, the only documentation for the VMU kit was in Japanese, another language I didn’t speak. Despite all that I figured it out over the following few months, then toiled and toiled and toiled to write what would be the first — and to my knowledge only — multiplayer VMU game. You could, you see, connect two of the mini handhelds together at the top thanks to a cunning, reversible connector. So, I wrote a Pong-like game played vertically, with the ball traveling from one screen to the next, back and forth.

Developing that game, plus another simple, Simon-like game, consumed my senior year at school. The resulting code, when printed out for my final thesis presentation, filled a binder as big as a phone book. Along the way I learned enough about the game development industry to realize it wasn’t for me, but that project, just me and my text editor toiling for months, is still the programming project I look back upon most fondly.

The recently remastered version of Shenmue.

GameSpot

Jeff Bakalar

I was 17 when the Dreamcast launched and was working for a dotcom start-up run by three 21-year-olds. I remember the day it went on sale, one of the partners ordered it for same-day delivery from a service called UrbanFetch.

It arrived and we didn’t do any work for the rest of the day. It was just nonstop Ready 2 Rumble. I recall being instantly impressed with how crisp the visuals were. It was a level of fidelity I hadn’t ever seen before.

Everything seemed so fast, so advanced, so futuristic. The Dreamcast arrived in between the other console cycles, so it felt like we were getting a very early glimpse into what the rest of the competition would soon be offering.

I didn’t wind up owning my own Dreamcast until college, but I eventually fell in love with Sonic Adventure, problems and all. I played most of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil games on the Dreamcast too.

The Dreamcast will always have a place in my heart for its ridiculous memory card adapters, its mostly awful controller and the insane speed at which its disc reader would spin and adjust, like some kind of dot-matrix printer that went off the rails.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Jason Parker

I never actually owned a Dreamcast, but for a period in my life, I could not get enough of one game: Fighting Vipers 2. It was while I was in college and one of my friends had a Dreamcast, so when we were not out at night or studying, we’d spend hours fighting match after match.

The funny thing is, it wasn’t called Fighting Vipers 2 as far as I knew back then. My friend had a bootlegged copy on a disc and everything written on the sleeve was in Japanese, as was all the on-screen text in the game. I even had to rely on him to start up games because I couldn’t navigate the menus. At the time, he explained the game wasn’t available in the States, but it didn’t officially come to Dreamcast until 2001 and never in the US.

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But once he started a match, it was button-mashing heaven. I remember being blown away at the crisp 3D graphics and cool-looking fighters at that time. But the best mechanic of all, and probably the biggest reason I loved the game, was that you could kick your opponent through the wall of the arena at the end of the match.

Maybe that sounds silly, but fighting games between friends can get tense. When you can send your buddy through the wall at the end of a long fight it’s an exclamation point like no other. We’d get dramatic about it too, yelling “Boooooooom!” as we’d blast the other guy about 50 yards outside of the cage.

So, no, I didn’t own a Dreamcast, because I was a poor college student, but I still have fond memories of stomping out my good friend in Fighting Vipers 2. “You’re going through the wall!”

Jet Set Radio on the PC, running at 2,560×1,440 pixels with largely the same assets as the original, still looks great.

Screenshot by Eric Franklin/CNET

Sean Keane

The Dreamcast was the most incredible console I never owned. Games like Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Sonic Adventure and the mighty Shenmue, and features like online gaming and the VMU made me want one badly, but I just couldn’t afford it as a 12-year-old.

Code Veronica looked incredible at the time of its release — replacing static prerendered environments with fully 3D ones and bringing in some sweet sweeping shots to showcase them. The blur effect as resurrected (and newly superpowered) villain Albert Wesker darted around made my jaw drop (this was shortly after The Matrix had blown my mind at the cinema).

It got an expanded rerelease — Code Veronica X — on the PS2 in 2001, but the original version hasn’t come out on any other systems. So my Resident Evil completionist urges aren’t quite satisfied… but it’s fine. I’m fine.

Sonic Adventure seemed like an incredible expansion of Sega’s mascot into 3D, even if it’s agony to play today. That whale chase looked amazing at the time and it seemed the obvious step forward for Sonic after Mario’s glorious transition into 3D.

Shenmue was the big one though — a glorious life simulator with a rich open world that was unprecedented. Seeing Ryo Hazuki wandering around Yokosuka, Japan, as he tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s murder was fascinating, and something I only got to experience fully through the recent remaster.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Eric Franklin

I bought the original Japanese Dreamcast from NCSX back in November 1998 and got two games: Pen Pen Trilcelon and Virtua Fighter 3tb. While Pen Pen was and still is terrible, VF3 was anything but!

Why did I pay a premium to have this system imported? I was a Sega fanboy and the Dreamcast was where I could continue playing Sega games beyond the defunct Sega Saturn.

But as much as I loved playing the Dreamcast, looking back now, it’s clear to me what it really represented for me: A last chance at console success for Sega. I got a Sega Master System in 1987 and from then through the end of the Dreamcast’s life I was not only invested in playing Sega games, but also hugely invested — emotionally, to be sure — in Sega’s success as a console developer.

It’s probably strange for people to understand that, but here’s the way I saw it: The more successful Sega’s consoles were, the more great Sega games the company would make. I not only wanted to play those games, but to also have other people discover how great they were. To see in them what I saw in them: Games with great graphics and simple gameplay that belied a depth you had to uncover.

You could play Crazy Taxi like a normal person, sure. But if you didn’t use the Crazy Dash and the Crazy Stop, which allowed you to go from 0 to 60 in less than a second and instantly stop, then you weren’t playing it right.

That want and need for the Dreamcast to be successful was real. Even at the time I knew that if the Dreamcast didn’t sell a certain number of systems, Sega would likely leave the hardware business, which the company eventually did.

And the anticipation of each new big release was addicting for me. It was less about how much I would like Shenmue and more about whether it would push enough mainstream audience buttons to make people buy a Dreamcast over a PS2. It’s silly to think about now, but that was me.

I guess I just needed something to distract me from my real life at the time. For a few solid years, it was the Dreamcast.

Gifts for the gamer who has everything: Please that hard-to-shop-for PC gamer in your life.

CNET’s Holiday Gift Guide: The best tech gifts for 2018.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Franklin Furnace at 40: Still Radical After All These Years

Installation view of “Burning in Hell,” an exhibition in Franklin Furnace’s “Food for Thought” series curated by artist Nancy Spero in 1991 (photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive)

The avant-garde is dead — isn’t it?

Rooted in a French military term referring to an army’s front-line “advance guard,” in the context of art history, “avant-garde” came to mean “trailblazing,” “rule-breaking,” and “forward-looking.” With regard to modern art, whose origins are generally traced back to the latter half of the 19th century, numerous avant-gardes, routinely emerging with tradition-busting fervor, contributed to the momentum of the modernist impulse.

Now though, from an early-21st-century vantage point, is it accurate to say that such movements have become art-historical artifacts — completed past chapters of a story that ended with paint-flinging Abstract Expressionism? Or with cool-detached Pop? Or perhaps still later, with the final elimination of the physical art object itself by a certain strain of Conceptual Art?

For Martha Wilson — artist, free-speech activist, and veteran arts administrator — and her collaborators at the Franklin Furnace Archive in New York, the avant-garde spirit is alive and well, and as relevant as ever; together, they’re committed to making sure it has the support it needs to continue shaking things up for years to come.

Martha Wilson, Mona Marcel Marge, 2011-2014, lenticular photograph, 20 x 12 inches (photo courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York)

Since last spring, the organization has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of its founding in 1976. Its program of commemorative events will soon culminate in a benefit art auction, in which bidding has already begun on the Paddle8 website; it will end in a live auction at Metro Pictures in Chelsea next Saturday, April 22. Various artists and galleries have donated works to the sale, which will include pieces by John Ahearn, Judith Bernstein, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, and Wilson herself.

Franklin Furnace’s mission might sound like something of a contradiction — providing institutional support to artistic-activist forces whose purpose, implicit or explicit, is to tear down social-cultural institutions while proposing new ways of looking at, thinking about and engaging with the world.

Still, the organization’s history offers a persuasive and often colorful argument in favor of self-styled avant-gardistes charging ahead as well as shoring up their own rear guard by documenting and, in effect, taking the lead in historicizing their accomplishments. Now, as Franklin Furnace celebrates its big anniversary against a backdrop of a money-obsessed art establishment and a vehemently anti-culture federal government, the meaning and value of its mission have been thrown into sharp relief.

Judith Bernstein, Schlong-Face, 2016, three-color print, 21 x 15 inches (photo courtesy of the artist)

Wilson studied at a small college in Ohio and then earned a master’s degree in English literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She stayed in Canada following her graduation and, in the early 1970s, taught English at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. With so-called second-wave feminism (which linked the social-cultural and political inequality of women) and the sexual revolution well under way, Wilson became inspired by the language-based conceptual art for which NSCAD had become a laboratory, with artists and critics associated with the new “idea art” passing through Halifax to present their work at the school.

By 1976, Wilson had moved to New York. Intrigued by the diversity of experimental art forms that were flourishing on the fringes of the art-world mainstream, she continued developing her own performance-oriented work, in which, through costume, speech, and behavior, augmented by self-portrait photography, she examined women’s social roles and the idea of self-identity as it was shaped by class-, race- and gender-based values and assumptions.

In that same year, along with a group of artist collaborators, she established Franklin Furnace as an exhibition-and-performance space in the street-front loft of an Italianate, cast-iron building at 112 Franklin Street in TriBeCa. New genres, such as artists’ books or performance art, which were time-based, ephemeral or not easily classified became the focus of the organization’s programming.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976 (estate print 1991), color photograph, 20 x 16 inches (photo courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC and Galerie Lelong, New York)

Just a few years earlier, in 1973, the American art historian Lucy R. Lippard’s landmark book, Six years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, had been published. It chronicled the rise of the new, often immaterial, idea-based art that had effectively led to the critical demise of familiar, physical, handcrafted art objects.

Wilson had also been following this new art’s evolution, along with that of performance art, which many feminist artists had embraced. (“After all,” as she once noted in a past interview, “as women, performance came naturally to us; we were all keenly aware that we were performing society’s defined roles for us all the time.”)

She was also very interested in the fresh, quickly mutating genre known as the artist’s book. “I was interested in the page as a kind of performance space,” she said. “At the time, lots of artists were publishing their work in various forms themselves, but it seemed that no established institutions were paying close attention to this phenomenon. Apparently, this material was not perceived of as art, or at least not as valuable art. I could see that there was a vacuum that needed to be filled.”

Artists’ books were often related to performance art, whose practitioners understood that if they did not photograph, videotape, film, or otherwise document their performances, they would have no lasting record of such events. And so they would often turn to making imaginative, one-of-a-kind or limited-edition books to serve these documentary purposes.

Performance artist Laurie Anderson in an early-career appearance on stage at Franklin Furnace, circa 1970s (photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive)

From the start, Franklin Furnace began amassing a collection of such books, along with related videotapes, photographs, films, and booklets, and all sorts of artist-produced, performance-associated or stand-alone ephemera, which entered its permanent collection. Franklin Furnace became one of the world’s first “alternative-space” museums, whose thematic exhibitions were often largely culled from materials in its unusual collection. Other pioneering, independent arts organizations were sprouting up in New York around the same time, each with a distinct mission in the service of emerging art forms, including Printed Matter, Artists Space, the Kitchen, and Exit Art. Wilson recalled, “In those early years, as Laurie Anderson used to say, ‘The same 300 people went to everything.’ But then things grew and took off.”

The writer-actor Eric Bogosian, who presented his earliest monologues at Franklin Furnace, recently noted by e-mail, “Performance in the late 1970s was totally focused on the artists’ community. It was a way of talking to one another, of trading ideas. The emphasis was on originality. Franklin Furnace was the venue where an important facet of my work began. Martha and curator Jacki Apple encouraged experimentation.”

Performance artist Paul Zaloom on stage at Franklin Furnace in his “Opus No. 39: New and Used Works,” February 1983 (photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive)

The Los Angeles-based performance artist Paul Zaloom, who also got his start at Franklin Furnace during its early years, told me in a recent interview, “I remember the lively, full houses and raucous reactions of the audiences.” Zaloom became known for his political satire and goofy-provocative performances involving puppets made from found objects. He added, “In the late 1970s, there was a paucity of humor in performance art; political content was also rare. Obscurity was rampant. As the culture wars, the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan nightmare erupted, a lot more queer, radical, and compelling work began to surface — even some funny stuff. Franklin Furnace was key to this new, much-needed trend, giving voice to lots of artists, like myself, whose work was explicitly political.”

In December 1978, Franklin Furnace hung a poster in its street-front window. It bore a list of the artist Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms,” matter-of-fact but edgy-sounding pronouncements printed in plain block letters. Their collective cri de coeur signaled that this new, downtown arts outpost would not shy away from the political. “You must disagree with authority figures,” one “Truism” advised. Another declared, “You are responsible for constituting the meaning of things.”

As the AIDS crisis tore through the Reagan ’80s, followed by the heated “culture wars” of the early 1990s, Franklin Furnace became both a showcase and a clubhouse for artists with political messages aplenty, even as it pursued more conventional curatorial projects. “We did shows the uptown museums wouldn’t touch, about subjects in which they weren’t interested,” Wilson recalled.

With the assistance of specialist guest curators, her organization mounted revealing exhibitions on such subjects as artists’ books from Japan (in a show assembled by the influential Japanese critic Yoshiako Tono). Its Cubist Prints/Cubist Books show broke new ground in its field and traveled to other museums in the United States. Along with exhibition-making, Franklin Furnace launched its Fund for Performance Art, whose grants enabled emerging artists to produce and present new works in New York. (Its grants-for-artists program still exists today.) Franklin Furnace also developed an education program, sending book artists, performers, photographers, filmmakers, animators, and videographers to work with children in New York’s public schools.

Installation view of the exhibition “Artists’ Books: Japan,” at Franklin Furnace’s previous, physical space at 112 Franklin Street, TriBeCa, 1985 (photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive)

Challenging censorship, Franklin Furnace courted controversial topics. In 1984, it was reprimanded by the National Endowment for the Arts for presenting Carnival Knowledge, an exhibition and performance art series that examined, with punchy humor, the notion of “feminist pornography.” In time, Franklin Furnace also became a key player in what the conservative commentator-turned-Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called in 1992 “a religious war […] for the soul of America.”

Political pressure may have played a part in an episode in May 1990, when New York’s fire department dubiously forced the organization to close its basement performance space in response to a call claiming the arts outlet was an “illegal social club.” The shutdown prompted Wilson’s team to present performances and events “in exile.” Their first, off-site venue: Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, whose arts-related ministry had made it a censorship-free center for experimental dance, art, theater, and music since the 1950s.

As the 1990s unfolded, Franklin Furnace became embroiled in the so-called NEA Four case, in which performance artists whose works it had sponsored — Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller — saw their proposed grants from the NEA vetoed by the agency’s director, John Frohnmayer, an appointee of President George H. W. Bush. Ultimately, the NEA settled with the four artists out of court and gave them the grants they had been denied. Still, they decided to litigate against the NEA’s congressionally approved “decency clause,” which had required the arts agency to judge grant-seekers’ proposals not only on their artistic merits but also according to “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.”

“Although the NEA Four finally won their grants,” Wilson recalled, “in the end, sadly, the arts agency stopped funding individual visual artists.” She added, “In a way, avant-garde artists both won and lost the culture wars. Certainly they often took the lead, through their art, in examining topics they felt were urgent but were not embraced right away by the general society. Eventually, though, those subjects became the ones everybody was talking and concerned about.”

John Ahearn, Chin Chih Yang, 2015/2017, painted plaster cast with aluminum cans, 20 x 21 x 10 inches (photo courtesy of the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York)

Wilson noted that, ironically, far-right activists learned to employ techniques avant-garde artists themselves had developed. “There was the time that a group of conservative activists calling for the death of the NEA tried to haul two coffins up the Capitol steps in Washington, DC,” Wilson said. “That one was straight out of the performance art playbook!”

In 1997, after winding down its on-site programming and selling its TriBeCa loft, Franklin Furnace launched a website and became an Internet-based presenter of performance art and, in time, an online archive of material documenting its past events. It sold its collection of artists’ books and related research files to the Museum of Modern Art. More recently, the organization became an independently functioning entity under the administrative umbrella of and in collaboration with Pratt Institute. Its offices are located on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, where the organization, drawing on its archive and considerable research resources, has been developing study programs in performance art and other areas, as well as helping to organize exhibitions.

Wilson said, “Now, after forty years, we find ourselves playing a Janus role: We still serve as an aid to avant-garde artists, which means we’re always looking ahead, and as custodians of decades of the recent avant-garde’s history, both with our physical and our online archives, we find ourselves looking back in time, too. These are big responsibilities, and we take them seriously.”

Installation view of the exhibition “Fluxus: A Conceptual Country,” curated by Estera Milman, which opened at Franklin Furnace in downtown Manhattan in October 1993 (photo by Marty Heitner, courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive)

Art historian Lippard, reminiscing by e-mail from her home in New Mexico, recalled her own past collaborations with Franklin Furnace, back in the days when, with limited resources — homemade vitrines, clip-on lamps — it mounted many a ground-breaking exhibition. “It has always been a haven for book artists, performance artists and political artists way outside the mainstream. Mike Glier and I curated Vigilance, an artists’ book show there in the early 1980s, with a banner quoting Antonio Gramsci overlooking card tables; the books were tied by string to their legs, and, remarkably, none disappeared.”

As long as artists continue calling for radical change in the art world, a position that, in the broadest sense, is inherently political, maybe there will always be an active avant-garde. Looking back over the past four decades, Lippard observed, “We thought it was bad in the 1980s, but the Furnace’s history has a special resonance today, when things are worse than we could ever have imagined.”

Franklin Furnace @ 40 Benefit Art Sale and Auction will take place at Metro Pictures (519 West 24th Street, Chelsea) on Saturday, April 22, from 5 to 7pm. Pre-event online bidding is now under way at Paddle8.

The post Franklin Furnace at 40: Still Radical After All These Years appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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