#last year was an exception because i will do anything for ryan

[cowgurrrl]

I’m Still Standing

Pairing: rockstar!joel x actress!reader (except he’s at home with the kiddos in this one)

Author’s note: yes I was influenced by Pedro’s Actors on Actors interview

Summary: Actors on Actors: You and Carolina Garcia-Long [2.0k]

Warnings: talk of pregnancy/family life, the age gap is finally ✨revealed✨, relationship stuff, Carolina being the best, discussions of sex scenes, I think that’s it!!

Carolina sits across from you in a beautiful white dress that perfectly compliments her olive skin tone, smiling big and bright. You've already been talking as the crew sets up around you, and you're struggling not to have too much conversation without the cameras rolling. It's been a long time coming, but after more than a decade of working together, you two are finally sitting down with Vanity Fair to discuss your jobs. Somebody calls to action, and a set of questions pops up over Carolina's shoulder, but you don't look at them immediately; you look at her.

"I'm so happy we're doing this," you say, and she smiles. 

"Me too! I feel like I haven't gotten to pick your brain about this stuff in forever." She says, settling into her big plush chair, and you nod.

"Well, it's like every other year one of us is pregnant."

"That's true because you had Sam like three or four years after I had Victoria, and then the girls were born last July, right?"

"Yeah, they're gonna be one soon." You say bittersweetly, and Carolina pouts her lips sympathetically.  

"Do you think becoming a parent has changed the way you work?" She asks, and you nod.

"Oh, absolutely," you say. "Even before we had Sam, Joel and I's older daughters totally changed my life and what roles I took and how much I worked. It's kinda crazy to think about how fast it all happened. Like one day, I was able to binge-watch Law & Order: SVU with no problem, and then all of a sudden, these girls came into my life, and I couldn't even think about it because it would make me sick to my stomach."

"That's how I felt after I had Elizabeth! They just change your whole world, man." 

"And can I gush about you really fast while we're talking about our kids?" You ask, and she laughs.

"Uh oh."

"No, it's all good. After I had Sam, I was so worried about how having a baby would affect my career, and my body looked different and whatever else, but you made me feel so safe and secure and loved. You reminded me I was able to have a career before I was a wife and a mother, and I could continue that career after. I don't know if I can ever describe... what you gave me because it was so integral to the actor I evolved into, and I've always had so much respect for you, not only as a friend and an actor but as a mother. And seeing how hard you worked made me want to work just as hard. Not just for me but for my children. So, thank you." You say, and Carolina reaches across the couch to grab your hand, and you smile. 

"Thank you for saying that. You know how much Ryan and I love you, so I'm glad to know that we were able to give you some actually good advice," she laughs, squeezing your hand. "We've been friends for a really long time now."

"Fifteen years."

"God, are we old?" 

"I don't know. Our first project together is about to turn thirteen." You say, both of you groaning as the fact settles between the two of you.

"Oh, my God, you're right!" She exclaims, dropping your hand to cover her face. "When we did Sweet Water, you had just moved to LA, right?"

"Yeah, it was my first series ever. Ryan told me you had just been cast, but they were still looking for someone to fill the role of Alex, so I went in for the audition, and I wasn't expecting anything, and they cast me right then and there."

"Which never happens."

"No, never." You agree, still not fully understanding what it is those directors saw in your all those years ago to cast you on the spot. Carolina points to her nose like she's remembering something, and you smile at the habit. She always does that when she has something to say.

"I will still get people who come up to me and tell me how much they loved that scene of us in the hospital because it was so raw." 

"Well, yeah, neither of us had slept the night before because we were filming, and we just let whatever was going to happen happen, and it ended up being one of those scenes that is just… once in a lifetime, y'know?" You say, and she nods. "You were and still are such a generous scene partner in everything you do, like in how you listen and react and really find your characters. It was an amazing thing to work on with you, and I still brag about you whenever I get the chance."

"I remember filming the scene where you came into the hospital all bloody and bruised and going home to tell Ryan, 'I think this kid has some serious potential.' I mean, you were just phenomenal, so I was not surprised when you started getting picked up by all these major studios," she says. "Speaking of which, tell me about The Beginning of the End."

"What do you wanna know?" You sigh as memories of those fifteen months flood your brain. 

"Everything. What was it like filming it? What did you think when you read the script? What was it like shaving your head on camera?" She asks. 

"Well, shaving your head on camera isn't much different than actually shaving your head because you pretty much get one shot to make sure it's good, and that's it. But, yeah, that was a hard movie to make. I was in a really weird place mentally, and Ruth was such a complex, nuanced, broken character, so it was interesting getting to know her and hard to let her go when we wrapped up. For better or worse, I still find pieces of her in my daily life."

"I remembered you calling us from Ireland and being like, 'I don't know if I can do this. It's so hard.' And I remember telling you there was no one else out there who could bring Ruth to life the way you did, and I still believe that to my core. There is nobody who could've played Ruth the way you did."

"You and Ryan were such an anchor when I was over there because I was alone and I was working all the time, and then it was always fucking raining, which is just not good for anyone's mental health and-"

"And you and Joel weren't together at this time, right?" She asks, and your jaw drops a little as you look at the cameras.

"Caro," you say, laughing. "I don't think I've ever talked about that publicly before."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Her hands fly over her mouth, and you reach out to grab her hand.

"No, it's okay. It's fine. All our loved ones already know the story, so it's okay," you say, squeezing her as a comfort. "But yeah, Joel and I were separated at that point which is another reason why it was so weird to be there alone."

"I remember you telling me you guys broke up, but it's been so long, and you are always together, so it's easy for me to forget about that. How long were you guys separated?" 

"Pretty much the entire time I was there."

"Wow," she breathes. "Do you think that separation made your relationship stronger, or have you just not thought anything about it until I brought it up in front of cameras?" She asks, and you laugh.

"No, I definitely think it made us stronger. We were both going through a lot, and I won't speak to Joel's experiences, but for me, separation was the best thing I had to offer at that specific point in our lives. And we really didn't speak at all while I was over there because it just hurt too much, and we were both working, and he was being a dad, and there were just too many moving parts. But when I got back to LA, we had coffee, and it was like no time had passed at all."

"Things were back to normal. Just like that?" She asks, snapping her fingers, and you nod.

"It was kinda crazy because we had both grown so much in that year or so, and I was worried that he wasn't gonna like the person I was coming back as or we wouldn't feel the same, but, oh my God, I'm gonna start crying," you say as you dab at the corner of your eye. "I still had so much love for him, and being with him and the girls… it just felt right like there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to be with them. And I knew if we could survive that, we could survive anything."

"And now look at you." 

"I know. Five kids and ten years later."

"How old were you when you met Joel?" She asks, and you have to look at the ceiling as you do mental math. 

"I was… Gosh, I think I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Somewhere around there. We met when Ryan and I were filming Hyde." You say, and she furrows her brows as she thinks.

"And how old was Joel?"

"Joel was either thirty-nine or forty when we met. Or..." you trail off. "Maybe he was forty because we met in the fall, and his birthday is in September."

"Can I tell you something I've never told you before?" She asks with a mischievous glint in her eye.

"Please."

"When Ryan told me you were dating Joel, the first thing I did was google how old he was because I knew he had two kids, so I was a little worried," she says, and you laugh. "But then we met him, and he was so goddamn charming. It's really hard not to like him."

"Isn't it the worst? He's got that accent and those stupid guitarist arms and those big, brown eyes," you gush, rolling your eyes. "And he doesn't even know how pretty he is, which is the most annoying part!" 

"Wait, so if you guys met during Hyde, did he know what the movie was about?" She asks, and you make an eek face.

"No, and I wasn't going to tell him because I didn't know how serious we were gonna get, but then he showed up to set with me one day, and we were filming the cabin scene-"

"Oh, the cabin scene!" She half-yells, and you laugh. "Dude, when that movie came out, I got asked about it all the time."

"Really?"

"Yeah! Well, everyone knew how close the three of us were, and when the movie came out, people were shocked that I would let my husband do a scene like that with one of his best friends. But Ryan told me he wasn't going to take the part until I read the script and approved or disapproved or whatever, but I thought it was just fantastic. Because it wasn't just about this relationship between these two people, it was about the different paths each wanted to take when it came to your character, Amber, being pregnant. Plus, it's just work. It's not like this was a real thing that was happening." She says, and you nod in agreement.

"I remember I got cast first, and then they brought us both in for a chemistry read, and we were like, 'this would be so crazy if we got to be in this movie together,' and then we were. And I think I do recall Ryan saying something about letting you read the script and you encouraging him to do which, thank you, by the way." 

"I didn't do anything except give him a nudge," she shrugs. "Wait, so Joel was there when you filmed that scene?"

"Oh, my God, yeah. I tried to get him to wait in my trailer, but he didn't wanna listen to me. So, he was off in the corner while I'm, like... filming this sex scene, and it was so embarrassing because we had only been dating for a few months at that point. Plus, you're already so vulnerable in scenes like that, but Ryan and Tanya Reid, our intimacy coordinator, were so supportive, so I felt really safe," you explain. "You did a good job with that one." You say, and she laughs.

"Yeah, you too."

#one for the money two for the show #rockstar!joel x actress!reader #rockstar!joel miller x actress!reader #rockstar!joel miller #tlou au #the last of us au #dad!joel miller

[outrunningthedark]

Guurrrrlll expand on those thoughts because Eddie does deserve more but I do sometimes wonder too about how R actually feels about all of it. But what do you mean being able to move in silence 🤫?

So, I agree with fandom 100% that it doesn't always feel like the writers know what to do with Eddie. I'd never complain about Shannon being killed off in season two, but looking at it objectively, ending that part of Eddie's arc so soon took away the opportunity for years worth of guaranteed drama (you know she'll show up, you just don't know when) and maybe even a true will they/won't they where the audience is left to debate whether the tension turns into love once again. Shannon gets killed off in season two? Tim knows exactly what Eddie's going to go through in season three. Grieve. Except. It's season three. What then? What comes after? When it comes to Ryan and his role on the show, he was obviously put in front of a camera/microphone many times those first two seasons because he was "The New Guy" that the audience had to get to know. And I know the popular take is that he's been put in "PR Jail" for a couple different reasons (one funny and one definitely not), but he does not conduct/present himself as a guy that *wants* eyes on him at all times. He has taken more offense to a fan-run instagram "forgetting" to include Eddie than he ever has with anything concerning the show. He's not happy with the way something is being promoted? He's free to use his instagram. Season four finale? Posted a video about Eddie not being dead and that was that. We got a couple of clips from the breakdown arc and then never heard anything else. When he was cleaning out his account over the spring/summer, he decided to remove older 9-1-1 content, something you'd think would have stayed if he wanted people to recognize or find him because of who he portrays. But instead, his page has become much more art and photography focused because he doesn't want to give the impression that acting is all he does or cares about. I just. I get wanting Eddie to be given juicier story lines, but have we considered that Ryan has seen what putting the spotlight on himself will bring about? Have we considered that these last five years - last three, really - showed him just how easy it is for people to track his every move? Have we considered that he's made peace with playing the role he's been given if it means he doesn't have to reveal too much of himself, or worse, act the way he thinks he should vs. the way he actually is because he has to be "perfect", has to fit a specific image, to get on anyone's good side these days? Ryan can want Eddie to have decent scenes without needing them to be The Thing everyone is talking about. Talking about The Thing means talking about HIM and with the way he ignores so much of what's said because it'll just bring more attention in his direction...I'm not getting the vibe that fandom's POV is at all similar to the guy they keep on defending.

#anonymous #tina speaks

[souryogurt64]

let me preface this to say i don’t like him either and think he’s mad annoying but i feel like you’re completely correct about the rewriting history thing re brendon and panic and just brendon in general. i think it shows how changeable bandom is and also the desire of fans to have a scapegoat to project anger towards instead of someone else such as their own faves who have also made missteps in the past related to any number of things. like i don’t think i’ve ever seen someone this universally hated except maybe bryar or morris though i feel like there have been instances where one person will just get continuous shit for awhile like it happened to pete in the late 2010s and we all know who’s in the midst of a scandal rn. brendon is an easy target also because he has bad aesthetics and people are embarrassed that they liked him during the 2010s esp i think a lot of new ryan fans. the same people also like to ignore that pete and patrick are good friends with him because pete is back in public favor (and ig patrick to some extent idk that he’s ever gotten true backlash for anything other than his adjacency to pete) because again it’s all about just having someone to direct hate towards even though a good portion of it is fairly deserved lol

Bandom is definitely really malleable and people ignore who is friends with who in favor of their opinions. I have been here for a long time and people's opinions of certain band members like Ryan or Mikey have fluctuated wildly.

However, I feel like the social justice elements of this stuff are very niche. There is a video on YouTube that is approaching a million views about Brendon's fall from grace and it barely talks about that stuff at all. The majority of time the video spends on that element are talking about vague "allegations" that point blank do not exist. But as a whole, it spends the most time talking about Panic! becoming cringe because of their sonic changes and High Hopes being licensed as Pete Buttigieg's campaign song.

No one on the street cares if Frank made an antisemitic joke in Instagram comments, but they sure care that High Hopes is annoying and doesn't sound like I Write Sins.

Overall, I think that when bands have to break up or go on hiatus due to public outcry or there is some huge scandal, it does not come out of nowhere and it is rarely actually about social justice. It's because the bands are falling apart, not selling well or sounding good, and burning bridges left and right so their fans are just mad. I tried really hard to demonstrate this in my 14k word essay about SWMRS and Burger, lol.

To use Pete as an example, Fall Out Boy had to push back MANIA, left their label and and went independent, and MANIA got the worst reviews of any Fall Out Boy album. Going back to Frank, MCR have been dangling a nonexistent album over their fans heads for 4 years now, which is approaching as long as they've been on hiatus and people are starting to get mad.

Comparatively, Brendon had a bunch of drama with Dallon who went on to start a really successful project. Also, from day 1 Panic have been surrounded by drama and scandals. I see a lot of people saying VLV was the lowest selling and there's been a lot about some technical/vocal issues on the last tour as well.

Also Brendon (and Ryan tbh) also seems to have a hard time behaving around interviewers. I honestly feel like this impacted how they are widely considered irrelevant and shitty by music critics, and I think this maybe also played a role in the missing press from the final album cycle.

Also, a lot of these bands have PR teams and management who can get control of this stuff. IDK what happens privately, but judging by what happened with Panic, Brendon seems to only want to be around yes-men and his "best friend" is on his payroll.

They also tend to have friends who are willing to go to bat for them publicly-- ie, recently when MCR and FOB fans got into a tiff, Mikey was onstage with FOB within 48 hours. When All Time Low and Gym Class Heroes announced a tour, it was announced the same day GCH were onstage with FOB. The way publications like Rolling Stone covered All Time Low thing is different than how it covered Burger. Etc.

Side note, I think Pete has always gone through periods of being the world's most hated, but in the 2000s things were just more honest and bitchy instead of everyone trying to moralize everything.

[bigswisscheese]

New Jodie interview. Please someone drop the name of her pup.

It's behind a paywall, so if you want to read it, it's below the cut!

It was a gamble that few actresses would have dared to take. After four years making her name as the charismatic psychopath Villanelle in Killing Eve, Jodie Comer rolled the dice — and changed her life.

Having not acted on stage since she was 16, Comer risked her growing reputation to star in a one-woman show in the West End. Prima Facie proved a sensation and transferred to Broadway. And last year the Liverpudlian won the most prestigious theatre awards on both sides of the Pond — an Olivier and a Tony — and, aged 30, entered a new era. The Com-era, perhaps?

Today she is a fully fledged film star, taking her first leading role in The End We Start From — a smart, bold post-apocalyptic indie drama about a mother (Comer) and her baby (not Comer’s baby). The film already has nine nominations for the British Independent Film awards, and Baftas should follow.

Comer is in a car with a lively dog when we talk via Zoom. She is in a black hoodie, with her long blonde hair loosely tied, and seems extraordinarily calm — except when the dog leaps across the screen. Her Zen is worth mentioning because the last time I saw her was when she prowled the stage with fear and fury in Prima Facie, playing a barrister who defends men accused of sexual assault before she is sexually assaulted herself. One woman going full throttle in defence of all women.

“My sleep was all over the place,” Comer says of her stint playing Tessa. “It’s tricky when you do something emotional. You think, ‘OK, it’s not real.’ But there is some part that tricks your body into believing that what you’re saying and feeling is a real experience. It becomes important to take care of yourself. With theatre it’s kinetic. You’re sharing space with 900 people.

“It’s … it’s tough. But clearly something I love putting myself through.” She pauses. “Yeah, I underestimated Prima Facie. Totally. I just didn’t know what to expect.”

It was not her first ordeal either. She’s drawn to gruelling roles, from Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, in which her character, Marguerite de Carrouges, was the victim of a rape, to Help, the bleak Channel 4 care home Covid drama. There was also Free Guy, a video-games blockbuster with Ryan Reynolds, but when I ask if Comer is tempted to pick something else fun as a break from Prima Facie, she explains that having a laugh is not enough.

“I like to be in a difficult place,” she says. “A place of self-discovery. Where I feel challenged. With Free Guy that part of me that comes away from my work feeling that I had to dig deep was missing … I came away thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve had so much fun.’ And that should be enough. But I like anything that holds a mirror up to this human experience. It’s just what I’m drawn to.”

Which leads us to The End We Start From. The film is directed by Mahalia Belo and takes place in modern-day London, telling the tale of Mother (Comer), whose waters break just as Britain experiences mass flooding. Metaphors à gogo, but the film works superbly as an intimate study of how an individual deals with a global disaster. How can a parent protect a baby as society collapses?

Comer is barely seen on screen without a baby. The crew had to use several because strict rules mean each infant can only work for 20 minutes at a time. (There are agencies that expectant parents use to sign their unborn child up to a film company.)

We all know an actor should never work with children or animals, but a baby is a whole other, wriggly challenge. Comer really does nothing by halves. How hard is it to act with one? “It’s such a lesson,” says Comer, who is not a mother. Did it come naturally? “Oh God, no!”

“The smallest baby was eight weeks,” she explains, smiling softly. “At first my hands were visibly shaking. My younger cousins have grown up now, so I’m not around babies an awful lot. It felt like a huge responsibility. I thought, ‘Wow, they’re so fragile.’ But I became more comfortable, sometimes to my detriment! There are scenes where we needed a baby to cry but I was soothing him instead. The crew would shout ‘Stop!’” She pauses. “I was kind of falling in love with them.”

The film shows the thrill of being a first-time parent much more than the panic. As prep for Prima Facie Comer watched cases at the Old Bailey. What did she do for this? “My best friend had a baby before filming, so I was able to ask personal questions,” Comer says. “I also spent time with midwives — there is a birthing sequence and I wanted to know about the physicality, where you feel pain giving birth. Having not had a child myself, I wanted women to see the truth in what they saw.”

It comes as no surprise that Belo was inspired to direct her first feature film after giving birth during the pandemic. “Your whole body gets taken over by this beautiful thing,” Belo says about being a mother. “Every part of your body is different from then on and it’s not only that — all your relationships are different too. You’ve got this other sound going on, that’s about your children. I wanted to represent that.”

The End We Start From is a film so clearly made by a woman who has young children, you can almost smell the nappies. Post-apocalyptic films usually star a man walking in a desolate landscape alone with his thoughts, and a dog. So it is quietly revolutionary to focus on a woman and her newborn.

“I think so,” Comer says. “What I love is that it’s a woman who is the everyday hero — we always see men with a superhero quality facing this situation. But here it is a woman many will feel they know. She’s not scaling buildings, or jumping over bridges. The story is deep-rooted in her psyche and emotion. It’s refreshing.”

The film also grapples with climate change. “Endless amounts of rain — I can’t see anything out of the window …” Comer says with a sigh as she looks out of the car at a very wet Britain. Belo, who lives in east London, made the film as her neighbourhood in Walthamstow suffered unprecedented flooding. When she consulted flood experts, their conversations were bleak. “Sea levels are rising, rainfall is becoming more extreme. We are an island; things are going to go wrong and we’re not prepared. We know what’s happening.”

For some The End We Start From will just be a stirring story of the lengths that we go to protect our children. Others, though, will locate an edge that is common to so much of Comer’s work. It is another entry on a CV that is trying to make a difference. Does she think that art can actually change anything? “Absolutely,” Comer says. “When I read the scripts they provoked an emotion in me that felt important. I felt engaged and that’s the biggest thing now, isn’t it? To keep people engaged in what you’re saying, and so that you can change things. I witnessed conversations around sexual assault when working on Prima Facie and saw subtle shifts within the law.

“Women and men were telling me what that play had enabled them to do, whether it was to seek counselling or have a conversation with their family. That may seem like a very small change but it is mighty in somebody’s life. You can see what a profound effect watching a piece of art has on somebody. That means a lot to me.”

This desperation to make stuff that really matters is why Comer stands out. She also excels in the 1960s-set The Bikeriders, about gangs and masculinity, out in the summer, alongside Tom Hardy. If you were to put her in a bracket of skill and achievement right now, you could say that she is where Jodie Foster was as she entered her thirties. They share the sass, steeliness and spark that Foster displayed in the controversial courtroom drama The Accused — which deals with the subject of rape — a sort of prototype Prima Facie.

#Jodie Comer #interview #The Times #I know there is an ethical grey area here with reposting behind a pay wall but it's not like it's someone substack or patreon #it's the times

[shyanshippingsociety]

Hiii <3 do you have any demon!Shane fic recommendations?

hello! sorry it's been a minute but we've finally gathered some of our members' favorite demon shane fics for you!

fics marked with an ‘♦️’ are written by our server members, can have been written before or after they joined 💙

♦️ Hell and High Water by ouijaboy | T, 5K, ongoing

“I’m telling you, there’s something evil downstairs.”

“And I’m telling you that there’s something disgustingly holy upstairs,” Shane retorts, “but what else is new? It’s been years, Ryan. I really do think they’ve forgotten about us.”

- 𓆩✧𓆪 -

When Steven Lim moves his restaurant into a strange industrial block, all manner of prophecies and switcheroos start creeping into the forefront. Luckily, Steven’s managed to team up with an angel and demon duo… And they might even be halfway capable at saving the world. (Hopefully without bickering each other to death.)

A Good Omens AU. In progress.

Speak No Evil by drunkkenobi | T, 4K, complete

It was boring, sitting in the silence, waiting for any kind of noise. Everything was amplified, from the movement of their clothes to the various bugs chirping outside. Ryan’s heartbeat was loudest of them all, even in the relative quiet. He closed his eyes, repeating his mantras.

I am not my fear. I am not my fear. I am not my fear.

“Then what are you?”

For You Are With Me by goatman_entrapment | T, 36K, complete

“I’m telling you right now if my eyes turn black, murder me.”

“And I’m telling you right now, I will not kill you.”

“Why?!”

“Because I need to save you!”

Or: Shane finally gets possessed by a demon and it's not as fun as anyone wants it to be.

The Worst Demon Ever by drunkkenobi | E, 67K, complete

Shane is so bad at being a demon that he fell in love with his best friend. When he purposefully leaves evidence in an episode of Unsolved, Hell decides to punish him the best way they know how: by going after Ryan.

One True Weakness by blacktofade | E, 6K, complete

Shane steals Ryan's soul, but promises it isn't anything personal.

And I Was Never Afraid of the Dark (Oh, the Weapon You Made of My Heart) by sequence_fairy | M, 9K, unfinished

Shane pulls Ryan out of Hell at 3:37 on a Tuesday afternoon.

He’s not looking at his watch at the time, but he infers the time later after he’s finally managed to get up off the desert floor, and has hauled them both back to the car he’d parked in the lot at the trailhead a little over a week ago.

Ryan’s a deadweight in Shane’s grip, head lolling back against Shane’s shoulder and body limp and unhelpful in Shane’s arms. His eyes are closed.

Or: Demon!Shane WIP, unfinished.

defiant acts of creation by anarchetypal | M, 2K, complete

Ryan finds out Shane is Not Traditionally of This World, and that’s— that’s fine, really, when it’s all said and done. Adult life is already so goddamn weird; Ryan feels like he’s prepared to let most anything roll off his back, so. Demons. Sure. As long as Shane’s not going to drag him to hell or eat his soul or whatever it is demons do, Ryan’s fine to keep working with him and having popcorn-and-movie nights with him and tumbling into bed with him.

He’ll fuck a demon. Whatever.

Except Shane says he’s not a demon.

If It Brings Me To My Knees by orphan_account | T, 10K, complete

The boys make a detour to Satan's Hollow while in Ohio. A last minute trip that proves itself more dangerous than anyone could have ever expected. It's there that secrets are revealed and two lives are changed forever.

I'm clean out of air in my lungs by Hauntings | T, 16K, complete

Ryan and Shane have been moving around something that is coming to a head between them. After a car accident, on the way to an investigation, Ryan slowly starts to become suspicious that Shane might not be what he seems. He realizes, though, that he just might not care.

there's no use getting down by orphan_account | G, 2K, complete

ryan accidentally summons a demon while making a sandwich

or, the one where shane madej is the cutest little demon that's ever existed, and ryan just wants a hug.

The Devil's In The Details by chaoskiddeer | T, 87K, complete

Shane had never thought too hard about taunting ghosts and demons. But it only takes one badly placed joke to invite in something that is better off left alone. His and Ryan’s comfortable friendship is going to be tested to its limits when a demon unleashes a storm of uncertainties into both of their lives, and lies pile up on both sides. One thing’s for certain: Once the storm passes, his and Ryan’s relationship will never be the same again.

i carry your heart with me by abovetheruins | T, 4K, complete

“You… got me a dog?” Ryan looks more confused than displeased, which Shane counts as a win in his favor.

“Yep,” he answers, popping the ‘p’ and grinning as Ryan’s face scrunches up in annoyance. “You’ve been saying that you wanted one and she kind of… fell into my lap, so. Felt like a sign.”

Ryan laughs. “A sign, huh?” He’s playing at nonchalance but Shane can tell he’s curious now. “What does she look like?”

Shane bites his lip, recalling the red-eyes he’d had to magic away and the mouthful of teeth that would only grow sharper as she grew older. “She’s a little angel, Ry,” he fibs.

♦️Call it Magic when I'm with You by punk_rock_yuppie | T, 2K, complete

In a world where magical creatures exist, three dudes are just trying to live their best life. Together.

Myliobatoidei by izzyspussy | T, 1K, complete

“I am not a demon,” Shane insists. There, in his bathrobe, with his horns and scales and pitch black eyes, Shane insists that.

Point of No Return by saturdayskeptic | T, 1K, complete

In hindsight, Shane probably should have known better than to walk back to his apartment by himself after a night out drinking, but hindsight is 20/20. No amount of thinking back on what he could have done, what he should have done, would help him in his current predicament.

An Idiots Guide to Coming Into Your Demonic Powers and Social Standing by snapdragonpop007 | T, 35K, ongoing

Written by Shane Madej, Owner of Alton Bridge, Seventh Duke of Hell and Advisor to Lord Satan, Our Majesty, Edited by Ryan Bergara, and translated into Enochian by Lord Beelzebub, First Duke of Hell and Advisor to Lord Satan, Our Majesty

(Enochian copy only available in the Seventh Circle of Hell, by request only)

Lead us not into temptation by Agf | E, 6K, complete

"It's obviously a demon thing. And I know you're on board with the eyes and the horns and the-" Shane waves a hand over himself, "-but this is different. This is me, specifically getting off on the thought of corrupting your soul."

Look, having a demon boyfriend and not roleplaying demonic sex just kind of seems like a waste, leftover Catholic guilt notwithstanding.

if you enjoy, consider leaving a comment or a kudo! authors appreciate it!

#mod ve #mod rowan #shyan shipping society #fic finds #fic recs

[miraculousbohemian]

alright rating the Gods that have been cast for PJO, go. (Not by numbers, I'm doing this off of a screen rant article)

Lance Reddick as Zeus. Amazing honestly. Such a shame he passed last March, he would have been amazing to see the next few seasons. Can't say much except rip Lance.

Next up, Toby Stephens as Poseidon. idk much abt him, haven't seen him anywhere, he looks like an older Glenn Powell. Yep that's it, imma go watch both top guns again

Jay Duplass as Hades. ok I like it Picasso. Once again. Don't know him from anything but he seems ok. Very Hades-y like.

Now onto the man, the myth, the legend. Dionysus. Played by Jason Mantzoukas, I fucking adore this choice, ik some people wanted Jack Black, and that's amazing too, but so far, he's killing it.

And now, Adam Copeland as Ares. *big sigh* we all know what I think about Ares, and idk if Rick is gonna fix some of the things I saw people say Ares said or did in the books, I sure hope so because- *entire fucking essay* anyway, I'm sure he'll be great, but I won't love him more then Kevin.

Hermes. You little Puerto Rican shit, how did you end up here. (as someone lovingly called him in a post) I mean, ok, unexpected but alright. But who am I to judge, we had Percy floss, why can't Hamilton be the God of Travelers, Thieves and Merchants?

AND NOW. HEPHAESTUS. TIMOTHY FUCKING OSMUNDSON. AAAA- I, honest to God, screamed when I saw him on the cast list, because. *points at XWP* that shit. We're gonna have so much, but it'll all be worth it once I see this man not getting himself killed at Ares's blade (looking at you, Eli)

idk why they listed Chiron here but it's amazing casting so far. I watched all 50 episodes of Young Hercules and I think Ryan Gosling should have a brief cameo just for funnsies.

they have not cast Aphrodite yet, but yeah. I will seriously not see Aphrodite as anyone other then Alex Tydings but alright. Artemis and Apollo have also not been cast as of 6.1. but it would be so funny if someone who's connected to other Greek mythology focused projects somehow gets cast, I mean, look at Timothy.

My man went from Xena, to spn, to Percy Jackson in a matter of 20 years that's nuts. Really looking forward to seeing him cause, yk. Eli.

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy series #xena warrior princess #mb rant :) #I CAST PEOPLE #yk this is fun #xwp #timothy omundson #lance reddick #lin manuel miranda #JUST HOW DUDE. #adam copeland #kevin smith (the better one) #alright. #that's it.

[unganseylike]

 Hi y’all! As promised, here’s my 2023 reading wrap-up – my reviews and thoughts about some of the books I read this year :) As a heads up, some of these reviews may contain very very vague and mild spoilers just because I personally feel like it’s impossible to give a good sense of my thoughts on media without that; so I’ll list the books I’m going to include in the order mentioned above the cut in case you want to 100% avoid any potential spoilers. Another disclaimer- these reviews are each quite different in content; my goal was to give a synopsis (except for a few I didn’t feel were worth my time), give my thoughts and mostly-non-spoilery takeaways, and connect to an overarching theme of this post. My initial goal was to write like 2 sentences for each book, but that definitely is not what happened. This is a long post. A long post where I gave into my inner booktuber and wrote like I was doing a video. I enjoyed writing this, but. It’s a lot. You might not enjoy reading it.

If you’ve read these books, I’d love to hear what you all thought…Since these are all books I read this year, I haven’t gotten to re-read any yet, and I’d love to have some new things to think about when I do! Please tell me if you check out these books after reading my list <3

Also…let me know if you have any books you’d recommend. I think this list might just give a sense of my picky taste. 

I’d like to give a shoutout the love of my life, Libby, for making this possible.

Books, in order of mention, with numerical ratings: 

What Moves the Dead- T. Kingfisher: 5/10

The Hollow Places- T. Kingfisher: 6.5/10

The Hacienda- Isabel Cañas: 9/10

The Honeys- Ryan La Sala: 7/10

I’m Thinking of Ending Things- Iain Reid: 7.5/10

The Ruins- Scott Smith: 3.5/10

The Cabin at the End of the World- Paul Tremblay: 4.5/10

The Beautiful Ones- Silvia Moreno-Garcia: 4/10

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau- Silvia Moreno-Garcia: 6/10

Where Ivy Dares to Grow- Marielle Thompson: 5/10

Beloved- Toni Morrison and The Turn of the Screw- Henry James (brief discussion, no ratings)

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost- David Hoon Kim: 8.5/10

The Fragile Threads of Power- V.E. Schwab: 4/10

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue- V.E. Schwab: 4/10

When the Angels Left the Old Country- Sacha Lamb: 6.5/10

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes- Suzanne Collins: 8.5/10

Project Hail Mary- Andry Weir: no rating because didn’t finish (bad)

Station Eleven- Emily St. John Mandel: 7.5/10

Severance- Ling Ma: 9/10

Annihilation- Jeff VanderMeer: 9.5/10

The Archive of Alternate Endings: Lindsey Drager: 8/10

Ok, let’s kick this off with my first category: horror and/or I read this because I thought it was horror but it wasn’t. Over the last two years or so, I’ve gotten into reading horror–ish books, because I like the genre expectations, and it freaks me out less to read it than watch it.

Over the summer, I decided to check out T. Kingfisher. I’d heard good stuff about her as a horror author. I first read What Moves the Dead. This is an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Both this book and the new Netflix show are pretty different from the original and each other, but of the two adaptations, What Moves the Dead is probably closer in tone and setting (19th century countryside, gothic elements), but that’s mainly because the Netflix show has barely anything to do with the original (thanks Mike Flanagan!). Like the original, the plot kicks off with the narrator receiving a letter from the Ushers asking for help, leading them to travel to a crumbling manor. On the other hand, Kingfisher’s book does casually take place in what must be an alternate reality; it’s set in the fictional country Ruritania, and the narrator, Alex, is from another fictional country Gallicia. This world building mainly functions to normalize nonbinary identity and unique sets of pronouns. This does play into the plot, but I feel like it wasn’t necessary to create a fictional culture just for this, or otherwise it should’ve played more of a role in the story…like the narrator could’ve just said ka uses neopronouns and it would’ve been more straightforward than creating whole new countries. This worldbuilding aspect was probably my biggest issue with the book (though of course I love cool linguistic discussions about pronouns and gender!), maybe along with the random cameos by Eugenia Potter (as in, relative of thee Beatrix Potter, of Peter Rabbit fame). There are some great creepy bits with fungus, rot, rabbits, and corpses. There are some similarities to the fungal horror in Mexican Gothic (which T. Kingfisher actually discusses in the appendix), but it’s not quite the same – either way, we love the crossover between fungus and gothic lit! Overall, certainly a far better adaptation of Poe’s story than Mike Flanagan’s, but some of the original content seemed out of place, while other original aspects needed more fleshing out. 5/10. 

I decided to try another book by T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places, which I had heard really good things about! This one’s an adaptation of the novella “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, which features some sinister willows and cosmic horror (fun fact: I read the novella because Algernon Blackwood is where Martin Blackwood of TMA gets his last name) (fun fact 2: read “The Willows” it fucks. it’s free on project gutenberg). Unlike What Moves the Dead, Hollow Places takes place very much in the present, following a recently divorced woman who moves into her uncle’s museum of oddities. She and her GBF (okay, actually, he’s the eccentric middle aged neighbor who is a barista at the cafe the narrator goes to get wifi, but he does feel a bit gay best friend cliche to me) slip through a hole in reality to an in-between dimension full of willow-y islands…and hungry eldritch beings beyond their perception. Please appreciate that full sentence. I really liked the times while the duo was in this other place, but some of the moments in their own dimension felt a bit discordant; I honestly think it’s because their present was so modern. Like it felt weird to read them discussing memes after exploring a deadly pocket world. But maybe that’s the point of setting horror/fantasy in the modern world instead of a vague past. Despite this complaint, I actually think this a better adaptation in comparison to What Wakes the Dead, with original content nicely expanding on aspects of the novella. I did kinda hate the climax, but I’ll ignore that and rate this 6.5/10. When you fear getting torn apart by terrifying otherworldly beings, it really does put your ex-husband’s annoying texts into perspective. 

Before I get back to mid books, let’s talk about one I really liked: The Hacienda from Isabel Cañas. I actually wrote a few notes about this right when I read it because I knew I wanted to share something about it eventually. Those notes were: “cinematic, especially in flashbacks, not so typical final girl or just female protag period.” Which was not that helpful for writing this review because I don’t remember wtf I was talking about, but I’ll try to interpret past-Julia for you all. The book takes place after the Mexican War for Independence, during which the father of the main character, Beatriz, was executed. So, with her and her mother dependent on the goodwill of their cruel estranged family, Beatriz happily accepts a proposal from a hacienda owner and is ready to prove herself a capable homemaker. But, there’s something deeply wrong with the house, something that wants Beatriz dead. The only one that believes her is the priest Andrés, who has recently returned to the area, where his beloved grandmother had taught him witchcraft and had been a pillar of the community. He struggles to keep his witchcraft secret, while protecting Beatriz and trying to take on his grandmother’s mantle. I think I enjoyed nearly every moment of this book! I got a little stuck on the beginning, but once I got through the first few chapters, I was so invested in the story and was really following the ups and downs as Beatriz tries to solve the mystery and escape some evil shit. I loved the main characters, especially the women and Beatriz’s role as a gothic/horror heroine (hence the “not so typical final girl” note?), and I remember being surprised by the actions of characters I thought I was rooting for! Also, it must be said. Hot. Priest. I’m not generally a big fan of romances, but it worked for me lol. And, as I said in my notes, some scenes were so cinematic- I could picture exactly how they’d play out in a (good) movie. 9/10! I need to reread this, it was one of my favorite books I read this year! 

Around the same time, I read The Honeys by Ryan La Sala, and also had written down some terrible notes (adding some punctuation to make it semi-readable): “the horror of hypermasculinity, hyperfemininity, and the gender binary, bees, mean girl cliques, superorganisms like bees and aspen and rot. Actually very similar to midsommar in terms of grieving protag and sunlight horror and uhhhh joining a cult. Also I learned the term social horror.” I think that says it all…but I’ll give a more clear summary. When Mars’ twin sister dies terribly, he decides to attend her preppy summer camp in her place to reconnect with her memory and learn about her strange violent death. Mars is genderfluid and has always struggled in his political and public-facing family, thus resulting in his parents placing their hopes and confidence in his sister. But at Aspen Conservatory, Mars finds himself drawn away from the traditional gender roles of the camp and toward his sister’s elite and insular female friend group, the Honeys. They seem to accept Mars as one of their own, but what exactly does that mean? Overall, I really enjoyed the book, especially for all the creepy stuff that happens by daylight. It’s a great example of social horror; the gender binary sure is sinister in this book! I had a few complaints though. I thought Mars was a fun protagonist, but I didn’t always understand his motivations and occasionally he felt a bit annoying to me…but he is a teenager who has just witnessed his sister’s horrific death, so perhaps that behavior was intentional. I wasn’t a fan of the mystery reveal/conclusion, it felt a bit out-of-left-field to me, but maybe I just missed something. Also, it was a little too YA for me at this point in my life (though I wouldn’t actually classify it as strictly YA, if that makes sense), but I’m picky about genre, as you will see in these reviews. 7/10– after writing this review, I’m definitely considering rereading so I can see if I pick up on more foreshadowing!

I had a note saved for my next book I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Iain Reid), but it’s a spoiler for the entire thing so I won’t share. All I’ll say is, it was a joke about final girls…you’ll get it if you read it. I read this after trying to watch the movie on Netflix and giving up because it was boring in a discomfiting way (the stilted conversation and repetition was all intentional but it was getting to me), but I still wanted to know what happened and figured the things that bothered me in a film media wouldn’t be problematic in a book. I honestly don’t know how to describe this because it’s super surrealist and very easy to spoil with any of my personal takeaways. Most basic summary of all time: a woman questioning her relationship with her new boyfriend decides to go on a road trip to meet his parents. I actually recommend watching the movie trailer to see whether you’d like the book, because it gives a good sense of the inexplicable weird and tense vibe and atmospheric horror. 7.5/10 because reading this made me feel itchy. It was supposed to make me uneasy, and it sure did the job.

Ok, next are two books I don’t feel like describing in depth because they were mid/bleh. The first is The Ruins, by Scott Smith. I just learned they made a movie of this? I was thinking that it would actually work better as a movie than a book, but apparently it did terribly in theaters. Quick summary- four young American tourists in Mexico explore Mayan ruins in search of a fellow traveler, but become trapped on a hill covered with man-eating vines. The official summary mentions “a creeping horror” and “the terrifying presence that lurks there,” so I want to explicitly say that the big bad is man-eating vines because I was expecting something a bit deeper based on the blurb. I’d classify this as survivalist/nature/psychological horror and want to note it’s pretty gory. I’d give 3.5/10. It’s fine, but not what I look for out of the horror genre. 

The second book is The Cabin at the End of the World (Paul Tremblay). I saw really good reviews for this (btw there’s also a movie, which I haven’t watched but apparently is very different), but it also wasn’t all that interesting to me. I honestly don’t remember the plot very well/don’t feel like I have anything to write about it, so you might be better off looking it up, sorry. I’d give 4.5/10 though. 

Next, we have a few books that fit under the “I read these thinking they’d be horror” umbrella. This is my own fault for assuming Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s other books would be similar to Mexican Gothic. I would say I mainly didn’t like these books because I thought they were going to be a different genre, so take my word with a grain of salt. I read Moreno-Garcia’s The Beautiful Ones and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau over the summer. The Beautiful Ones is what I learned is called a “novel of manners,” where the quirky main character must navigate elite society to search for a suitor. The twist is that this takes place in a historical fantasy universe– the main character and her love interest have telepathic powers. I wish that the fantasy elements were more smoothly incorporated; I think this book could’ve been much better as magical realism. Even if the author didn’t want magic to be the main focus but for it to still be included in the story, magical realism would make that possible! I’d give 4/10, but that’s partially because I’m not really interested in the genre; if you like romance or YA fantasy with a twist, this might be fun, but I unfortunately do not! 

I somehow made the same mistake with The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Okay, actually this one might’ve been a result of requesting it on Libby months before, then forgetting what it was by the time I got the book. This one I liked a bit better because the story had more interesting political meaning and is sci-fi/historical fiction, but it still wasn’t 100% for me. It’s inspired by H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, which I haven’t read, so I can’t comment on this as an adaptation. It takes place at a hacienda in 19th century Yucatan, Mexico, where Dr. Moreau experiments making human/animal hybrids and cares for his sickly daughter, Carlota; beyond their estate, a Mayan rebellion is mounting. The plot kicks off as the Moreau’s resources dwindle, and they hope to resolve their financial troubles with a union between Carlota and their patron’s son…but, of course, things are not what they seem at the hacienda. I enjoyed reading the book, mainly for the commentary on connections between colonialism and patriarchy, and was definitely invested in the story, but I think it just wasn't my taste– all in all, though, 6/10.

One more book in this category, but this one’s not actually my fault. This one actually mentions Mexican Gothic in the description just to fuck with me I guess. Where the Ivy Dares to Grow (Marielle Thompson) does indeed intentionally use gothic tropes and subverts them, which I guess is cool, if you don’t carry a sense of betrayal about getting gothic lit baited :/ Saoirse travels with her fiance to his family’s ancestral manor as his mother reaches the end of her life, but his parents have nothing but contempt for Saoirse. Plus, the passion has long since cooled between her and her fiance, especially as he has grown exasperated with her mental illness that causes her to disconnect from reality. Though the manor seems unwelcoming at first, she eventually grows attuned to its idiosyncrasies, and begins to slip back in time to meet her fiance’s charming ancestor. While I found a lot of this book frustrating (not just because of the genre betrayal…), I did like the incorporation of a protagonist with a dissociative disorder (specifically, Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder) into a fantasy genre. I think many times with fantasy, characters will question their sanity, only to be reassured with the realization of the truth of their magical reality. Here, the fantasy setting doesn’t negate Saoirse's struggle with mental illness, or vice versa. I think the conclusion was well done in this vein, and it increased my perception of the whole book. Despite my bitterness. 5/10. 

Before we leave the horror genre, I want to mention 3 books I read during my ghost fixation this spring, which don’t 100% fit as horror, but y'know, ghosts. I read Beloved (Toni Morrison) for the first time ever! There’s a million things online/in literature about Beloved, it’s a classic, nothing unique I can say, other than it’s so so incredible and who am I to give it a rating. My class read The Turn of the Screw (Henry James), which is the 1898 novella that “Haunting of Bly Manor” is based on (once again, Mike Flanagan is out here making wild adaptations…). We discussed it through a queer theory lens, and I recommend reading it with attention to sexuality and innocence, and how interrogating these things can be deeply violating. 

I read an excerpt of David Hoon Kim’s Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost for that same class, and I liked it so much that I read the whole book. Fun fact- half of the title alludes to the poem “Ghost Q&A” by Anne Carson, which I actually used in a web weaving post (here’s the relevant line: “A: have you been to Paris; Q: no; A: Paris is a ghost; Q: no it’s not”).  It plays with nonlinear time, since ghosts classically disrupt the progression of time and the definition of a “present;” us trc folks are quite familiar with that… The book follows (in the most ghostly use of the word) Henrik, a Japanese adoptee raised by Danish parents, an expat living in Paris. To top off the layers of identity and belonging, Henrik begins working for a blind physicist (i.e., someone who can’t see and question his ethnic background) as a translator between English and French, neither of which is his first language. The book is divided into three parts across Henrik’s life; the first centers around the implications of his girlfriend’s hikikomori. The third part focuses on Henrik later in adulthood, which I personally found less engaging than the other two (which I REALLY liked), but that may just be me and my interests as a young person, and that was my only issue with the book. I’d say this book is for fans of nonlinear storytelling, ghosts (of course), interrogation of identity, language and the art of translation, ambiguity, and weird shit. 8.5/10. Also I have a pdf of the first chapter (from when I read it for class), so DM me if you want to read a sample. 

Finally, we are done with horror (or are we? More on that later).

Next is a category I call “YA/YA adjacent/adult fantasy/gave me YA vibes sorry I know this is a controversial classification but that’s how I think of it.” 

I’ve already made two petty posts about the two V.E. Schwab books I read this year , The Fragile Threads of Power and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (here’s one post, can’t find the other now). They were…fine. First, Fragile Threads– it’s a spinoff series (?) from A Darker Shade of Magic, which I read a while ago and liked but forgot the details, so I think I’m a pretty good objective reviewer here. This new book takes place seven years after the original series and follows the original main characters and a few new ones. I think it was a good choice to have this fairly hefty time skip. The original characters are now in their late 20s/early 30s, which is unusual in the genre (or often post-time skip, the characters’ issues will be suddenly all solved and they’re all comfortably settled into adult life and domesticity). On the other hand, the new main characters are both tween girls, which felt like a strange choice and made everything feel kinda disconnected. I would’ve liked to spend more time with the new characters; the older set had pretty disproportionate screen time (perhaps Schwab felt readers who are big fans of ADSOM would be unhappy otherwise?). The major plot beats felt really rushed and unearned (especially the resolution of one of the major conflicts offscreen…if you’ve read it you know what I mean). When the next books in this new series come out, I’ll check them out, but I’m not that invested. 4/10. Regarding Addie LaRue, yea it was mid and I don’t feel like delving into it. readwithcindy has a video about the whiteness of the book  and books like it, which is worth checking out. Also 4/10. I still don’t believe that every person in the world would feel compelled to COMMENT ON ADDIE’S FUCKING FRECKLES WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT HAVING SEVEN FRECKLES I DON’T GET IT??????? Anyway. 

As per many tumblr recommendations, I read When the Angels Left the Old Country (Sacha Lamb). It’s a queer Jewish immigrant story that follows an angel and demon who are chavrusas (Talmudic study partners); they leave their shtetl for America to find and help a girl from their village. Along the way and through their time in America, they explore things like free will, gender, names and identity, labor justice, and fucking up rich people. I felt like this was a good historical fantasy, and I’m always up for Jewish fantasy! I’m not super into the angel and/or demon thing I know tumblr people like, so fans of those tumblr posts that are like “an angel is actually high tension wires” would probably like this. 6.5/10 - not 100% my taste, but definitely a fun read and I can’t believe this is the only really Jewish book I read this year. Someone tell me about more Jewish books please. 

There’s a couple other books I read in this category, but I don’t feel strongly about commenting on them (and we definitely don’t need to discuss the fact I read two game of thrones books in like a week for no reason), so let’s move on to my next set, sci-fi/apocalypse-y/dystopia. 

I read A Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds early this year. Obviously lots of people have been discussing it recently because of the movie, so all I’ll say is that I was pleasantly surprised. I was nervous it might be another pointless spinoff about a villain’s backstory (and trying to justify their actions), but this is definitely not that. This book had shit to say, and it was really well done. 8.5/10. 

I want to start the rest of this category with a book I didn’t like before getting into books in this genre that I felt worked so much better, at least for me. My brother sent me a paragraph-long text with a glowing review of Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir). He’s not a big texter, so I figured I had to check it out- I joined the long long waiting list for the book. And, I couldn’t get through it. I really tried, but everything about it annoyed me so much, despite the fact I had liked The Martian which is a fairly similar style. First, the narrator exemplifies the worst of scientist characters; while reading this book, I posted several times to complain about this problem. If you haven’t seen my many personal posts about my life, I currently work in a microbiology lab and ultimately want to become a research scientist. I regularly interact with truly incredible scientists, people I aspire to be like one day. But if I asked my supervisor to calculate a star’s orbit in her head, I think she might slap me. I really don’t think you can write a realistic scientist who is an expert in every subject, and the weirdly humble and immature attitude of the book’s narrator pissed me off more because of this. The fact he claims to be a microbiologist but seems to do everything but microbiology is beyond the point…It would be much more interesting to me to have the narrator find himself so out of his depth in a time of crisis and/or when alone in space. Of course, this would require some more creativity to move the plot forward, but that could be really cool! My other major reason for not finishing was the actual apocalyptic conflict. This was more a personal thing for me than a book problem; the conflict is a bit convoluted, but not bad in itself. Honestly, reading about an all-consuming response to a planetary crisis was just overwhelming and some aspects of their stopgap solutions made me physically nauseous (I don’t want to give specific spoilers but uh. I think the idea of what happens with the Sahara and Antarctica were what actually made me finally stop reading). On the other hand, it made me so sad to think about a reality where such a crisis warrants the appropriate response. We have a real planetary threat on our hands, and we can’t even mobilize the bare minimum measures because of the same capitalist and exploitative motivations that have driven climate change this whole time. This second unrealistic aspect gave me a good dose of climate doom. I can’t rate the book because I didn’t finish, but I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this one, since I don’t understand why it has been so praised. 

I do think it’s possible to more realistically handle the idea of proportionate crisis response and normalcy/lack thereof in an apocalypse situation. We have all been living through a pandemic and have all personally experienced how quickly the definition of “life as normal” can change, as well as seen our world’s failure to raise a just and appropriate response when profit is in the picture. I’ve felt pretty sensitive to how fiction handles these topics, and I have a few broad  categories for pandemic media: pre-COVID and eerily accurate or pre-COVID and absolutely inaccurate; post-COVID and insensitive (it gives the audience a little elbow, like “hey we all remember THAT right, look, it’s been incorporated into this story lol!”) or post-COVID and tastefully incorporates some interesting insight or post-COVID and ignores the whole thing (though it’s a different question whether you can create something fully new without incorporating lived experience even subconsciously) (as another note, I want to add that before 2020, I was really into the science history of pandemics, but haven’t done much reading on that front since) (also, when I say post-COVID, I mean post-outbreak. COVID rates are soaring right now, let’s stop ignoring this. While we’re in a parenthetical, please get the new vaccine if it is accessible to you). 

Both Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) and Severance (Ling Ma) were indeed published prior to 2019, and so they fit into category #1. Reading them this year actually felt really valuable and almost cathartic, rather than anxiety-inducing. Station Eleven loosely follows several people who are connected by their involvement in a production of King Lear immediately before the outbreak of a deadly flu. The fairly extensive glimpses into their lives prior to and after the outbreak round out really nicely. I like that we see such a range of ages of characters. One of the main characters was a young child when the flu started, and most of her screen time takes place twenty years after; only a small fraction of her life took place in what the older characters view as “normal” times. So what does that mean for people like her (or those born after the outbreak)? Should she be mourning something she experienced for just a few years? Her whole life has taken place during a period of apparent transition, but what is the world transitioning to? When does a transition end? After twenty years, there’s a sense of peace and predictivity to her reality- isn’t that a sort of normalcy? I also really liked the way all the characters were loosely connected to one another; there are lots of books with such setups, but I like that this connection doesn’t entail some great mystery or a climactic meet-up. Connection is just how the world works. 7.5/10; it left me with things to think about, but it was a bit of a slow read for me at some points.

While I read Station Eleven because I saw my lovely mutual posting about it, I read Severance because my coworker posted about it…but what are mutuals if not coworkers. It is similarly made up of pre- and post- outbreak scenes, but it follows only one character, Candace Chen (interesting quote from a New Yorker article about this choice: “...Ma flouts a trope of dystopian fiction, a genre that, with its fixation on the fate of civilization, has a tendency to produce protagonists meant to stand in for society at large. Rather than an Average Joe, Ma gives us a Specific Chen, conjuring an experience of the apocalypse through the lens of someone whose variegated identity is not an exotic distraction but part of the novel’s architecture”). These scenes of the past are less strictly cohesive flashbacks, and more snippets of Candace’s dispassionate existence. When the epidemic breaks out, she keeps working her corporate job in bible manufacturing in New York City, even as her superiors and coworkers leave or fall ill, even as the city’s infrastructure crumbles and she moves into her office, until she eventually is rescued by a band of survivors. Candace is a cog in a machine, otherwise adrift and lonely in late-stage capitalism. The Shen Fever isn’t a disease where the victims fall ill and die, leaving the sight of the narrative; the fevered linger, acting out loops of their daily/familiar routines until they finally wear themselves ragged and die. So, there definitely is more cutting, explicit criticism of consumerism and capitalist society in Severance than Station Eleven. It’s also more psychological (and ambiguous). While Station Eleven gave me a sense of peace and calm occasionally, I never felt that here, where the non-fictional aspects of life under late-stage capitalism is inseparable from the book’s fictional dystopian elements (perhaps the difference in tone between the two books is because Station Eleven is about connection, and Severance’s narrator exemplifies the disconnection wrought by capitalism). There’s not really a sense of urgency or stress, though. In my opinion, that’s because (as many of us have experienced) when crisis is happening all the time, people become exhausted and adjust their idea of normalcy to some level of tragedy. Between the symptoms of the fever and Candace’s commitment to work a pointless job through a pandemic, this book really did eerily reflect the world’s insistence on “life as normal” during the beginning of COVID. There is so much more to talk about with Severance (I was mainly focusing on how it compares in regard to a sense of normalcy in crisis, but there’s SO much interesting stuff in it- I didn’t mention at all, for example, the role of immigration), and I highly recommend checking it out if you don’t mind an uncomfortably realistic sense of impending capitalistic doom! 9/10.

These three apocalypse books all used scenes set before, during, and after the onset of a crisis, so it’s interesting to me that they have such different relationships with normalcy. I’d be super intrigued to hear what y’all think about these books (or other similar ones) and their very different treatment of the same themes.

Sorry for the mini book report there. It’s time for me to talk about one last sci-fi book, which was actually one of my top books of the year- Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer). I read this after I finished my last finals of my university career, and I finally had some time to myself. It was a strange and liminal sort of period for me, existing in this space for two weeks where I was just anticipating graduation and my move to a new city, a looming end to life as I had known it the last 4 years. I spent several evenings sitting on the quad, enjoying the nice May weather, and barely noticing as the sun set and it grew dark around me. I really expected nothing from Annihilation and couldn’t believe how much I loved it. For one, it gives me hope that scientist characters don’t have to be awful (unlike Project Hail Mary’s protagonist, the narrator here sticks within her field and even explicitly mentions being recently refreshed on the scientific topics relevant to the story). I don’t know what genre you would call this– it’s like 60% horror 40% sci-fi (but I couldn’t bear to add another book in the horror section, that’s why it’s in here, and also I wanted another jab at Project Hail Mary’s protagonist); it’s cosmic horror, where the incomprehensible thing is biology and the strange inhuman beauty of nature. The narrator is simply called The Biologist, a woman who is absolutely fascinated about the natural world; she’d be satisfied staring into a puddle in a parking lot for hours. I love her. She joins a mission, made up of women also referred to simply by their fields, to learn more about the mysterious environmental disaster zone called Area X. The movie’s description calls this a “mysterious zone where the laws of nature don’t apply,” but I think the Biologist would say the exact opposite. The story, told through her field journal, records the team’s investigation into Area X and the terribly strange and beautiful things she encounters there; meanwhile, she reluctantly reveals her not-so-scientifically-objective motives for signing up for this doomed expedition. You’ve probably heard of the movie and/or seen gifs of its beautiful visuals; this is one of the cases where the movie is pretty good (and Oscar Isaac is there), but it’s really a completely different piece of media than the book- I recommend reading the book as a separate entity than the movie. This one is a 9.5/10! Once I reread and better understand the conclusion, I’d probably add that 0.5 points back. Has anyone read anything similar to Annihilation they recommend? I need more of a funky scientist interacting with surreal natural horror. 

Ok, one last book that I would consider miscellaneous to my categories here, but theoretically could be scifi? 

I read The Archive of Alternate Endings (Lindsey Drager) after seeing a quote from it in a tumblr post. In fact, you might’ve seen the post I recently made with a different excerpt from it. I finished it just before the new year so that I could fit it in here and give it the honorary place of the last book :) Archive combines a lot of things I know y’all like: the circularity of time, folktales, web weaving, siblings, tragedy, nautilus shells, etc. Since we’re at the end of this post, I’ll give a better go of describing an experimental book: a natural history of storytelling, as traced through the tale of “Hansel and Gretel” and Halley’s comet. Not sure if that makes sense, but essentially, Archive reveals the human connections at each 74 year interval of the comet’s orbit, from 1378 to 2365, through revisiting the meaning of “Hansel and Gretel” to different pairs of siblings. Compared to other works that attempt to do the grand connections across time and space thing, Archive does this very well, probably because this structure is not an afterthought and it’s not a tool to build anticipation of the characters meeting- it’s the thesis statement. One thing I did have trouble with was the incorporation of real historical figures into this piece, especially considering its structure. I was able to more easily digest some of the historical liberties taken than others; I didn’t mind the historical figures and original nameless characters separately, but it was strange to see Ruth Coker Burks (though she’s not named explicitly) interact with a pair of fictional siblings. 8/10. Other than that issue, I think this book worked well and was a great last read for 2023!

I said that was the last book, right? Sorry.

I realized I’ve never posted here about one of my favorite books, and I want to use this as the chance to talk about it, if anyone’s still reading at this point. 

I read A Tale for the Time Being (Ruth Ozeki) in the spring of 2022. I learned about this book because someone had left it in a classroom I was teaching in, and I thought the title was great, so I took a picture of the cover and eventually searched for it at the library. How’s that for fate? Here’s a brief summary. A novelist with writer’s block finds a journal that has washed ashore. Alongside the novelist’s annotations, we read the words of Nao, a Japanese teenager. Nao has decided to kill herself, but first she wants to do something that’ll matter: write about the incredible life of her great-grandmother, a hundred year old Buddhist nun. Despite her best attempts to focus on her grandmother, Nao ends up using the journal as a diary, documenting the events of her own life that have led her to plan a suicide. While Nao’s life and her intentions are obviously extremely bleak, she writes with a delightfully bright and peppy voice that makes her journal both a pleasure to read and that much more devastating, as we quickly begin to care deeply for Nao. The novelist’s parts of the book are objectively weaker than Nao’s, but her role as helplessly studying the journal years in the future is definitely necessary for the book to work (plus she’s the framing device). I do want to note content warnings for Tale; suicide, of course, but also I was surprised by brutality of Nao’s bullying (I’d loosely define some of it as torture) and the escalation of events toward the end. So adding some less obvious CWs in case people wanna check it out: graphic depictions of bullying; sexual assault; racist fetishization of Japanese women; child neglect; and lots of discussion of suicide. Beyond that, I’d add that this book is just absolutely packed full of everything, which can make it seem occasionally a bit all over the place, but it’s all connected, so it’s worth it to try to follow the various threads. From reviews I see online, some people LOVE this book, others hate it, so it might be an acquired taste…but personally, I recall it as one of the best books I’ve read and am going to take this as motivation to finally reread it. 

Right, now we are done. So what are the takeaways of this ridiculously long post ? Here are few bits of wisdom I learned from my 2023 reading: You have got to read the originals that adaptations are based on because Mike Flanagan and co will fuck around with the source material, but also because knowledge of the source material can add a lot to your understanding of an adaptation you enjoy (and there’s usually a reason someone found them worthwhile of adaptation). Screwing with time can work incredibly well in any genre, but it will come off as cheap if the author doesn’t get the implications of non-linear time and just wants an excuse for excessive flashbacks. There is good pandemic fiction out there, you just have to avoid cringey COVID-derivative material. Stop making your scientist characters be experts in everything, and start making them obsessed weirdos. And take better notes than a string of adjectives if you want to write in-depth book reviews. 

Thanks for bearing with me through this post! Let me know what you think! Did you read these books? Agree with me or disagree with every word? Do you have any recommendations for me? Read something good with a ghost in it? Or do you want to share books from this year you hated? And should I channel my inner booktuber and do more posts like this?

Happy New Year!

Julia

#hi guys! i said this was long right? because its really long #i was possessed by the spirit of insanity and book blogger #this was one of the few times where me taking forever to finish something wasnt because gave up. it was because i wrote so much

[pollylynn]

Title: Watchman WC: 800

“I don't want to pretend.” —Kate Beckett, A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

She regrets the Bat Cave metaphor. She regrets raising the specter of Alfred, and she especially regrets referring to him as a multi-millionaire crime fighter. Some of that is predictably instantaneous: she chides herself for somehow forgetting that his ego never needs feeding. And there's a part of her that hasn’t gotten one bit less raw over the last decade that wants to  knock the wind out of him for reducing her pain to a comic book plot line. 

It doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. Not that anything at all makes sense when someone hits that particular nerve, but that’s kind of the point. Frustratingly, enough, he’d tapped it none-too-gently less than twenty-four hours after they’d met. Yes, he’d noticed her dad’s watch, and yes, he had of course felt compelled to play smartest kid in the room about it. 

But now, he is being—for him—kind of sweet. And though it pains her to admit it, he’s also being helpful. Which is why she’s there, late in the evening, intruding on his strange family circle in the first place, right? She needs someone’s help, and none of the usual someones will do. 

Ryan and Esposito hardly even bother to hide their smirks about the Castle-induced overtime she's been putting in on cases lately. And they certainly aren’t hiding their exasperation when they get roped in because she’s now in the business of cutting lose perfectly good obsessives, greasy nightclub owners, and violent drug dealers because their unfortunately resident Batman knockoff can’t leave well-enough alone. 

She can’t go the boys or to the Captain or even to Lanie without a lecture about getting a life, letting it go, switching it off. So she goes to him, and doesn't that make her Commissioner Gordon—or worse, bumbling Officer O’Hara? So, yes, she has reason to regret the Bat Cave metaphor pretty much right away. 

And then the case takes its turn and her regret turns with it. He can’t leave well enough alone. He can’t reconcile the characters of Former Detective Sloan the put-upon Deloris Marsh, and  she finds herself forced to scour the very darkest recesses of a Bat Cave that could have been. She finds herself forced to confront Ben Davidson.

In some ways, that’s simple. She is not lying when she lays out the difference between a cop and a writer for Castle. There is a fierce, bitter kind of pride in knowing that she is no Sloan. She does not engage in shoddy, I figured it was gonna end bad. . . or I saw no reason to doubt . . . police work. She has never decided how any victim's story ends through lack of effort or failure to see a case through. 

So she follows procedure, as she has in every case for her entire career. She ushers the man into the back of her car and drives in total—miraculous, considering who is riding shotgun—silence from White Plains back to the city. She sits across the table from Ben Davidson and puts out of her mind the image of his granddaughters shrieking with laughter as he comes crashing out of the bushes, playing monster. She fixes in it, instead, the image of their tears at the death of their father, the nights they must have awakened wailing and crying out for him. She looks him in the eye and declares that killing Sam Cavanaugh was not the answer. 

But she doesn't know that for a fact. She doesn’t know what an answer looks like for her, for the Ben Davidsons of the world. For Bela and Simone Cavanaugh when they're old enough to understand the enormity of their father’s actions, their grandfather’s . . . 

And that, Detective Beckett, is why you are here. 

She became a cop to solve her mother’s murder. His glib, nutshell version of the defining event of her life isn’t substantially different from the one she’s told a handful of times to less than a handful of people over the last ten years. That’s the story. Except Ben Davidson makes her wonder if that's the story at all. 

She has never been to war, but lord knows guns are easy to come by. She has never had the opportunity to demand the truth from her mother’s killer and offer forgiveness in return. She has never had the raw rush of satisfaction at reneging on such an offer and letting her rage speak—letting it roar at last. She will never have that opportunity. 

She is a cop. Her city-issued piece sits quietly, heavily in a box with the objects that connect her to life she saved, the life she lost. She doesn’t get to decide how the story ends. 

In the wake of Ben Davidson, she doesn’t know if that’s nobility or cowardice. 

A/N: Although the late-night editor has not spared you this story, it has spared you considerable material on all the (non-Burton) times Batman has caught and confronted his parents' killer. You're welcome-ish?

image via homeofthenutty

#Castle #CastleABC #Castle: Season 1 #Castle: A Chill Goes Through Her Veins #Kate Beckett #Richard Castle #Martha Rodgers #Alexis Castle #Lanie Parish #Johanna Beckett #Javier Esposito #Kevin Ryan #Roy Montgomery #Jim Beckett #Fic #Fanfic #Fanfiction #Fan Fic #Fan Fiction #Writing #Fabrications

[popsiclemania]

pmy is doing something

getting my kdrama mojo back from pmy in lic. this is an avial of all rom com tropes i love and i can already see it go off the rails in the second half.

i'd love to know if writers write to pmy or if she does something to the material as it comes to her. because i know people think she's playing the same thing over and over again, but i think with every character in the last few years she's been trying to add to the template of the rom com heroine built through her filmography.

its very interesting that these heroines are super feminine and invest in the motions of mainstream society - in their clothes, in their looks, their extreme politeness, in maintaining their place in social hierarchy - and she plays each of these like armours and weapons as needed. her heroines are always playing against some power dynamic. they are almost always made of steel, extremely efficient, meticulous about work and she uses that competence to give them a kind of fearlessness .

they are living their own lives and yet yearning for some kind of freedom. and it's not freedom from something directly oppressing them (though there is also that in the storyline). her heroines usually want the freedom to not always go through the motions of their daily life, to not have be answerable to family or to work, to live free of these limits, to not be who they are.

i think it's fascinating to see that both in wwwsk and in lic, her heroines don't know exactly what they'll do when they stop working but they are excited by the unknown life it will open to them.

their outward appearance and behaviour does little to make them seem out of step with the world and yet her heroines usually have some element of 'it's me against the world'. (lic is probably a show that's more overt about this, but you can see these taking shape from wwwsk)

it's why i watch her even if the shows falls apart around her.

i mean even her expectations from romance and from the hero are 'typical'. she enjoys and desires a knight in shining arming, she likes them to be gallant, she wants to be coy, to be wooed, she's very disappointed when they do not respond to expectations. her arc with the hero follows the kdrama template but their dynamic doesn't. her heroine doesn't respond well to being rescued from anything. she doesn't capitulate to the demands of romance, instead she waits, assesses the situation and then works it out in a way that makes sense to her character. her heroes are varied - a narcissistic chaebol son (almost satirical in how it was written and played) (wwwsk), a progressive fever dream in ryan gold (hpl), a warm but traumatised introvert (wtwif) and a manic pixie weather forecaster (flw). they are allowed to be human, to be vulnerable, in need of care and capable of giving and receiving it. (though kdrama romances do tend to do a better job of this than other entertainment industries)

it's very different from kim go eun's romance heroine who doesn't always look like the uber-feminine heroine, but stresses it in her actions and emotions. her heroine always yields. who she is is very much in response to who the hero is. without him she'll fall apart. and the hero is varying templates of THE MAN, affording them little to work with except bravery, jealousy and sacrifice.

anyhoo, all of this is just another chapter in my lifelong grudge against indian on-screen romances.

#love in contract #park min young #romance #curious what pmy's heroine mean to the domestic audience

[biographydivider]

Birthday Cakes in Different Dimensions

Happy birthday @acewithapaintbrush! You are an absolute gem of a person and I’m so happy we met. This will have to do until I can give you your actual gift (wink) 💕 💕 💕

Leo is baking a cake. It slopes heavily on one side; weighted down by thick buttercream icing from a tub, so sugary-sweet it sends zips of electricty up his spine with every heaped spoonful he shovels into his mouth. The layers are uneven, because he used his ōdachi to cut it. In mid-air. He attempts to pipe the delicate, decorative swirls Mikey spent an hour teaching him how to do, but they come out uneven; one is perfect, the rest look like half-melted snowmen. He places half a strawberry on each one and hopes it isn’t too noticable.

He spears the sponge with two sparklers and sets them alight, presenting the cake with a flourish so theatrical, it almost sets the dish cloth slung over his shoulder on fire. It’s chaotic. It’s flashy. It’s ridiculous. It’s the first special occasion since the Krang, so of course he’s going to go all out. Raph - the birthday boy, sitting on the floor surrounded by shreds of wrapping paper and his doting, fussing, bickering family, trying not to well up and failing miserably - wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Thanks, bro. For everything.”

...

The bridge is quiet; except for the yowl of a cat somewhere in the brush below. Shane isn’t heavy footed - weird for someone with his gangly height - but he can hear every creak of the wooden boards under his shoes.

“Uh, hey,” he says into the darkness, tupperware box in hand. “Goatman? You here, buddy? It’s me. Shane. Your landlord, I guess; since I own this bridge, an’ all.” He squats down on the bridge - bringing his height to about that of the average Ryan Bergara - and places the tupperware on the ground. “So I dunno how time works for you, but it’s six years this year since we last talked. More than half a decade. A lot has changed since then, y’know? And I think a lotta what’s come our way is, in part, because of our funny little japes together on this bridge. We’re pretty popular on the old Youtubes. Do you know what that is? Probably not. So I thought I’d...oh, what the hell.”

He takes the cupcake out of the tupperware, places it on the boards, and lights the tiny candle. Ryan would kill him if he found out about this. That, or bust a gut laughing.

“I broughtcha a little something, is all. You got anything to say about that?”

The bridge is quiet.

“Didn’t think so.”

...

You’ve never seen a birthday party ‘til you’ve seen a Madrigal birthday party.

Flowers and music and food and dancing, shouting and laughing and singing. Colours and fireworks and kisses smushed into cheeks, gifts upon gifts, aguardiente and happy, drunken tears. Hours and hours of non-stop celebration for the Children of the Miracle. But as the clock strikes midnight on a birthday they never thought they’d share, the only people awake are the triplets themselves. Let the community enjoy the party to come. This is just for them. The cake in front of them is small, but no-one minds. Right now, there are no children, no pets, no husbands or mothers or townsfolk demanding their share. They sit together around the dinnertable, the only light in the room coming from a flickering candle - a lovely, ordinary, cheap candle from the store that smells of clean smoke instead of life-altering magic - leaning on each other, heads touching, hands intertwined, whispering to each other like a prayer.

Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday.

#writing #rottmnt #ghost files #(kinda) #encanto #acewithapaintbrush #the best of all of us

[glassprism]

Hello! I have a question though I’m not quite sure that you’re able to answer, but I think I should try anyway 😃

Today it was announced that the Phantom of the Opera by Ken Hill will return to Japan next year, now with Ben Forster as the Phantom. So JOJ last time, Forster now. Previously usual thing was that performers from Hill’s adaptation (Kevin Gray, Sylvia Ryan, Richard Poole etc.) were coming to Webber’s adaptation but now it feels like we have an opposite trend, the only exception I can think of is Mark Wynter who initially was André and Phantom u/s in Webber’s Phantom on West-End and then performed Richard in the UK tour of Hill’s Phantom.

With that being said, what do you think, can this trend be a sign of producers wanting sacrifice the originality or identity of Hill’s show in order to attract people using the fame of Webber’s show (one way or another)?

Thank you!

If I'm going to be honest, I don't know enough about Ken Hill's Phantom to talk much about it, or to even know that it has an identity that can be subsumed by casting primarily ALW actors.

That being said, I don't necessarily know if that should really be a worry or anything. It is possible that JOJ and Ben Forster are being cast because they were in the ALW version and can attract fans to it (though I dunno how many fans Forster has in Japan - that seems like something that might work better if Ken Hill's version came to the UK, where Forster seems much more well known). But it is equally likely that they were cast because they can sing the role, they can act it, they understand the the character having played a different version of the Phantom, and at the very least, they're fine with performing whilst wearing major prosthetics and masks.

And ultimately, I think that you can cast actors who were well-known in the ALW version for marketing purposes but not change the show itself. That's a totally doable thing! It's not an all or nothing situation where it's either "cast actors with no previous experience in any other version of Phantom to keep the show pure" or "cast actors who were in another version thus destroying its identity". And I would try to trust that the directors and the actors respect Ken Hill's version enough to keep it it's own thing and not try to make it a mimic of ALW's version; for an actor especially, I'd think they might even find that boring, playing a copy of a character in a different version.

Finally, if we're talking Japan, it has had at least four different versions of Phantom playing - ALW, Yeston and Kopit, that play adaptation of Susan Kay's novel, and a previous production of Ken Hill's Phantom, and as far as I can tell, they didn't feel the need to alter any of them to fit in with ALW's version. So based on all those factors... I guess I wouldn't worry about it.

But then again, what do I know? I'm not someone who really follows the Ken Hill version much. The uber-fans of Hill's version probably have their own, much more knowledgeable opinion!

#GP gets asks #anonymous

[bambamramfan]

Year in Review

This year I wrote two LARPs, went on more than a few road trips, started Lexapro, went to one con, and otherwise did not accomplish a lot that can be measured, except for watching a truly absurd number of movies. Fortunately Letterboxd makes it a lot easier to record that.

By my count, I watched 469 movies this year. This does not count rewatches. When this counts television, it is only for an entire series counting as one movie. Many of the movies - basically anything 1.5 stars or less - I did not finish because they weren’t worth my time.

Full movie list here, because it's too large to fit into a Tumblr post.

I would say none of the movies I watched this year were truly great, S-tier movies, compared to last year which had two (EEAAO, and Vengeance.) However, I found this year had a good variety of movies at the A-tier below that (some of which I still need to see.)

But this makes choosing “the best” difficult. Instead I will hand out awards:

The “Hold a Gun to my Head and Threaten Cronenberg Style Violence on Me to Pick 2023’s Best” Award goes to Infinity Pool, by Brendan Cronenberg.

The Studio Ghibli Award for “I Meant to See This but my Theater Stopped Showing It” Award goes to How Do You Live AKA the Boy and the Heron.

The “I Can’t Believe Three Contenders for Best Movie of the Year Were All Released on the Same Day” award goes to Oppenheimer, Barbie, and They Cloned Tyrone.

The “Dogtooth” Award for Yorgos Lanthimos Sure Does Like Fucked Up Sexuality goes to Poor Things. Also a recipient of the “Cruella award for Damn Emma Stone is Fine” Award.

The Don Glover Award for “Black Made Movie that Manages to Hugely Offend the Identity-Left” goes to Antebellum.

The Most French Award goes to Holy Motors.

The First And Only Time Directing Awards are split. The “I Really Want to Be Nicholas Refn and Everyone Hated It” Award goes to Lost River by Ryan Gosling. The “If You All Liked It So Much Why Hasn’t Anyone Hired Me to Make Another Movie” Award goes to Emma. 2020 by Autumn de Wilde. (Though Don Jon by JGL is a runner up.)

The Alice Krige “Borg Queen, Controlling Mother of a Cult Leader, Vengeful Hollywood Witch - What Can’t She do?” Award goes to She Will. 

The Brit Marling “Creates a Cult Following Also a Cult” Award goes to Broadcast Signal Intrusion, by Jacob Gentry.

And finally, the Zack Snyder “Everyone Hates This but C’mon It is Clearly Amazing Camp” Award goes to Saltburn, by Emerald Fenell.

#films #2023

[msclaritea]

Where to Watch ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest’ — 2024 Edition

Blind Items Revealed #2

February 10, 2017

With his popularity waning because he is not on television each week, this A list mogul is threatening to pull his production deal with the parent company unless he gets back on the air now. Thirsty f**ker. Always likes you to think he prefers being behind the scenes. Nope. His ego is HUUUUUUGE. So, now the company is going to overpay for a worn out franchise from a different network.

Ryan Seacrest/American Idol/NBC

Blind Items Revealed #5

July 13, 2021

Except for making some things blind items, I have left it entirely in the words of the tipster.

I was invited to spend time this past Memorial weekend hanging out with this animator/writer/illustrator/one hit wonder (#1) who had a short lived series on this almost network several years ago. The show attracted a significant cult following when it aired on (#2) and this person still has a strong fan base within his subsection of pop culture. To this day, he never appears out in public where he might be recognized or allows any photos to be taken without wearing his signature disguise that he’s worn since the inception of his show. (He didn’t wear it Memorial weekend when out with me. I completely didn’t recognize him when I first saw him.) Everything online, including his Wikipedia bio, is fake and written by him. He will do anything and everything to keep people from knowing any personal info about him. He desperately attempts to project his age much younger than his 54 years and while his real first name is very close to his fake persona, his last name is not.

To say that he is a horribly racist individual doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of his deep seated racism. A very nice and genuine friend of his that I met last year, he refers to as, “that rich Jew”. He believes everyone in the Little Armenia section of LA hates white people. He was upset that his neighborhood is being “invaded by Mexicans”. A kind friend of his, who happens to manage a very popular bar, graciously let us cut to the front of the line to get in because he was getting angrier and angrier at having to wait. When talking about his friend that got us in the bar, he continually made disparaging comments about the fact that the guy only dates black men. He repeatedly said throughout the weekend that he doesn’t like inviting this person to his house for parties because he brings a boyfriend and hates having black people in his house.

He texted me Sunday afternoon and inquired about lunch and thrift shopping (something we have in common). I said sure and hoped that Saturday’s deplorable behavior was just due to having an off day. Nope. As soon as I picked him up, he was in a horrid mood. When I called him out on it, he said that he could just not talk to me at all (tempting but awkward). He asked what I had done all morning. I told him the fun I had and the great places in LA I visited. He laughed and said he thought I was probably sitting in my hotel room waiting for him to call. (Pro tip: when in LA be sure to visit the immersive art exhibit at Cakeland LA.) I suggested we eat lunch at El Coyote. I had always wanted to eat there. He got more irate and asked who I thought I was that I could pick where we ate. Not wanting to argue with someone with the temperament of a four year old, I let him pick lunch. While waiting for our food he asks me who I think is gay in LA. (I’ve been an avid reader of CDAN for over a decade; I know my Hollywood gays.) First name that comes to mind is the mogul (#3). He says he’s heard that #3 might be gay. Next up on my list is the talk show host/game show creator (#4)’s ex boy toy, (#5). He says that he has met #5 numerous times and there is no way he can be gay because he is so nice and gives back to the community. (That may be true but Helen Keller could tell #5 is gay.) I tell him I’ve always thought this A+ list mostly movie actor (#6) was gay. He replied with the antiquated and false notion that #6 can’t be gay because he’s married with kids. He wasn’t joking. He actually believes this! While we were dining outside, he randomly starts yelling at me out of nowhere. People stopped eating and were staring until I told him to calm down because someone was going to call the police on him. His ability to go from zero to unhinged, screaming rage is only surpassed in speed by JLo’s ability to call the paps when lunching with Ben.

After lunch, we went thrift shopping. The first spot we hit, he found a book he wanted to buy. It was $2.75. At the counter, when told the price, he said he didn’t have any cash. I stepped up and paid for the book. As soon as I got outside, I was berated for paying for the book. He said he had cash and he told the sales clerk he didn’t to see if he could get the book for less money. It was $2.75. The money was going to a charitable organization! He literally complained about everything, including his constant inability, due to his size, to easily get out of my rental car, a Ford Mustang. He argued that getting out of my own car, a Mini Cooper, would be much easier. (No way.)

After I dropped him off at home, I had a delightful dinner at El Coyote. I decided that there was no way I could spend another nanosecond with him. Life is too short to waste time with someone like this. I used my points on Southwest to fly to CA. To change my flight to an earlier one would have cost me over 28,000 points. I called Southwest and asked if I could please change my flight and not be charged the additional points. The customer service rep said she would need a reason to tell her supervisor why an exception should be made. I told her who I spent my weekend with and what had transpired. Southwest allowed me to change my flight without using any of my points; even they realized what an ass he is. I do feel sorry for his long suffering partner and the unmitigated nightmare it must be to live with him. He’s looking to restart his career with another series. Miraculously, he got a pitch meeting with some executives at Amazon. To the surprise of no one but himself, there was never a second meeting. This man is a vile, narcissistic human being.

#6 - George Clooney

#1 - Angus Oblong

#2 - "Adult Swim"

#3 - David Geffen

#4 - Merv Griffin

#5 - Ryan Seacrest

#6 - George Clooney

Blind Items Revealed #4

November 28, 2023

Apparently the wannabe Ryan Seacrest and the launch of his new venture was sparsely attended. They were expecting hundreds of people and got maybe a dozen.

Mario Lopez/Shoe collection

#Ryan Seacrest #Hollywood Velvet Mafia #NBC #Anyone scObling #David Geffen #George Clooney #Mario Lopez #American Idol #Dick Clark Rockin New Years Eve

[hoperays-song]

If Johnny and Ryan had met when they were kids - maybe Ryan's family living in/close to the town Johny lives in, before moving to the big city - Or an AU where Ryan is a part of Sing 1, how would you imagine that playing out? Any headcanons?

Oooooo, great question! I'm gonna split these two up between your two asks since they're about the same two topics, so that I can go more in depth on each one. This is going into if they met when they were kids, I hope you enjoy!

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

In this au, Ryan and his family would have moved to Calatonia right after his youngest sister was born since she was sick to be near a better hospital. Ryan was 14 and while he was offered to stay in Klaus’s troupe and live at the dorms, he ultimately decided that his moms and sisters needed him there.

Since they probably moved in the middle of the year as well as Ryan spending his free time helping his moms with Amy so they could be at the hospital, Ryan was a bit of a social outcast. 

Which only really helped him meet Johnny faster, as they were paired together for class projects since well, no one else would pair with them. Because of that, the two started hanging out and actually becoming friends, eventually even spending time together outside school.

Ryan definitely caught on to the gang pretty fast (literally one trip to the Taylor’s apartment and he knew) and confronted Johnny about it, sparking their first fight. But once he realized why they were stealing and that Johnny didn’t actually want to be involved, they patched things up decently quickly.

After that, they were pretty much inseparable, even as Ryan got more popular in school over the next few years. Ryan was the only one Johnny told about his love of singing and Johnny was the only one Ryan felt confident in telling about his regrets of leaving dance, even if it was what was good for his family at the time.

They continue to be each other’s entire support system up until Sing 1, with their only really arguments about Johnny’s increasing involvement in the gang. Ryan calls Johnny the moment he hears about the singing competition to encourage him to try out and even goes with him to the auditions. When the gang gets arrested, Ryan shows up at the garage with scallion pancakes and custard bao buns, for once doesn’t argue with him about the gang, and just helps him pack a bag so he can come stay with his family.

Ryan also would tag along to the theatre last minute remodel and help, along with bringing food for the performers (his mom’s idea). He also helped Eddie work backstage during the show and comforted Johnny when he was clearly upset (we could also have a shielding scene from Ash’s spikes here). Ryan’s visibly happy when he notices Johnny reuniting with his dad and he’s also in the ending photo at the new theatre.

I think that sometime within the year in between the two movies, Ryan would have gone back to Redshore on his own and eventually gotten his role back in Klaus’s troupe in time for Sing 2. He does keep his troupe’s involvement with the show a secret until Johnny shows up to class however, surprising him with an excited hug.

During the course of Sing 2, we would actually see Ryan fighting Klaus’s treatment of Johnny on screen (not that he didn’t out of this au, we just didn’t see it). This would lead to a series of escalating arguments between the two during classes and when Johnny had his panic attack, Ryan actually quit and went to comfort him instead of doing what Klaus wanted him to. They work with Nooshy together and also do the final performance together as both of them against Klaus this time. We also see Marcus greeting him with a clap on the shoulder and him being treated as a member of the family as well.

I wouldn’t really do anything except hinting at a Rynny plot line til the second movie mainly so we could see character growth and relationships a bit easier in Sing 1. However, in Sing 2 we can easily add in the two spending time together along with more flirty interactions. During the rest of the performances, Ryan and Johnny can be seen holding hands off stage, and seem flustered when Nooshy apparently points it out but don’t stop. Ryan is also asleep with his head on Johnny’s shoulder on the bus back to Calatonia, and we see Johnny smiling at him softly.

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

TL,DR: Ryan and Johnny were each other’s support systems and Ryan essentially served as Johnny’s version of Eddie in Sing 1. In Sing 2, we get to see a lot more development in their relationship and a potential ending alluding to them being a couple.

I’m sorry if this got off track or is hard to follow, I’ll write it out more soon. I hope you enjoyed! Thank you for the ask! - <3 Gooseless

#sing #sing 2 #sing au #sing ryan #sing johnny #sing ocs #this is just a rynny centered au #but i still like it #childhood friends to lovers #ryan also definitely knew they didn't know calloway in this and just didn't snitch #he also didn't snitch about the gang but wasn't happy about it #mainly because johnny was actually involved #i'm sorry you cannot tell me any of the sing 1 characters were popular in high school #it's high school everyone's mean there #ligers actually have a lot of health problems naturally so that's why i write ryan's sister being sick when she was little

[the-last-rat-standing]

My MIL is a HUGE NCIS fan, though her interest has waned as the seasons past 10 have gone on. I mean, she knows the characters names and their ‘lives’ more than she knows about her grandchildren. (In her defense, she has a LOT of grandkids.) She has seen S1-S8 episodes -no word of a lie- at least 10 times each. It’s her comfort show that she puts on in the background. She’s still not over Kate dying. This is the kind of fan she is. 

It just so happened that one of the channels was showing season 19 re-runs, and I know she’s only seen those once, because she’s pissed about Mark Harmon leaving. So I was curious to see if she’d watch them. She did, but she said something very interesting about the remaining Harmon episodes.

“I think he got really tired of the show. That’s just my opinion.”

To which I said, “You know, I didn’t want to say anything, because I know you’re a big Gibbs fan, but I agree.”

You can hear it in his voice. You can see it in his performance. Now, I’ll never accuse him of phoning it in, but it’s pretty obvious the spark is gone. The only time he looked truly happy was when he was acting with Pam. And maybe that’s what is the worst thing about how they treated his exit. Instead of letting him happily ride off into the sunset in season 18, they dragged him out another 4 episodes because they were afraid no one would tune in to the season 19 premiere if they knew he wasn’t going to be on it, and I think he felt obligated to the cast and crew to do it. Except those 4 episodes were some of the most ridiculous bits of storytelling this show has to offer.

I had only seen those episodes twice- once in real time, once to go over some of the ‘what the fuck???’ parts. Seeing them again, even in part (I just couldn’t convince myself to waste the time watching the full episodes), only reminded me of how ridiculous it all was. And how much of a let down those episodes were. I’ve beaten this horse to deal in other posts regarding the hole in the wall, the news announcement about Gibbs’ ‘death’, the pile of questions his up and leaving creates, but man, those things aren’t any better on a rewatch. I will say, one thing that really struck me that I hadn’t really noticed before was the way the writers used Pam Dawber’s appearance as this random sort of joke about Gibbs and relationships. There’s a huge chunk of an episode that is just the team wondering if Gibbs is banging Marcie. And I’m all, “Weren’t you the same characters who thought, SIX MONTHS AGO, that Gibbs and Jack had a thing?” I mean, I get the writers’ being unable to resist teasing the idea because -hur hur hur- they’re married in real life! Yeah, it’s lazy, but okay. But that’s something that would’ve worked between Sam Ryan and Jack Sloane. It doesn’t work when you’ve spent 3 years building a relationship between Gibbs and Jack, have them kiss in her last episode, and have basically have her leaving as the catalyst for Gibbs’ breakdown. It is a slap in the face to the hard work the actors put into it. (And to be fair, it’s like the writers are slapping themselves in the face, considering they were the ones who wrote the Slibbs arc.)

Rewatching those episodes, and I barely recognized Gibbs. They turned a sharp, driven character into this... doddering old man who doesn’t know how to eat in the presence of company. They turned a pillar of strength into a broken man. (Which would be fine if they were serious about talking about mental health, but they wouldn’t dare shine a spotlight on the dangers of writing a man as a Lone Wolf hero.) They left a man who found a family in the his work, alone in the middle of nowhere.

(As an aside, seeing Jimmy and Knight in these eps, knowing what we know now, is like second-hand future embarassment. I recently said they were the romantic equivalent of an unseasoned boiled chicken breast slapped between two pieces of Wonderbread, and I stand by that comparison. So very, very obviously pushed through because there are no other pairings the writers can work with. And I will never get over the fact we went from characters like Tony DiNozzo and Jethro Gibbs as the show’s romantic leads to... Jimmy fucking Palmer.)

The channel then went back to the earlier seasons, and it was like a relaxing exhale that cleansed everything we’d just seen. Hard to believe it’s the same show.

#ncis #mark harmon #leroy jethro gibbs

[shyanshippingsociety]

Shyan Shipping Society Mod Fic Rec List - August 2022

hello and welcome to the august fic rec list! your mods ve, shade, cerys, juice, rowan, and nicole have gathered some of our favorite fics (and commentary) for your reading pleasure! enjoy!

Ve:

Modus Broperandi by strawberrymilano | E, 28K, complete

Shane’s never had a bro bone in his body. Except, lately… Lately, whenever he sees a bro, he falls into natural bro behavior.

It’s an out-of-body experience.

Ghost!Ryan AU.

I'll be upon you by the moonlight side by drunkkenobi | E, 22K, complete

“It’s weird, you know.”

“Weird” wasn’t the word Shane would’ve used. Terrifying, scary, awful, upsetting, grotesque, sure, but weird? Not high on his list.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that Sara would get bit by a wolf on a full moon.”

“Ryan.”

Shade:

hey boy, take a look at me by weakspots | E, 17K, complete

Ryan is 27, for Christ’s sake, and he’s not exactly hideous, so there’s really no reason to spend his money on a dude — a dude — whose face he’ll never see but whose livestreams he’s been jerking off to for roughly 4 months now. He should be going out and partying and fucking random chicks. Or a guy, whatever, just to get it out of his system and confirm to himself that he really is 100% straight.

Because he is. This is morbid curiosity, if anything.

Teacher's Pet by chapscher | E, 24K, complete

“You aren’t describing a teacher’s pet! You’re describing… I don't know the name for it. Someone who tries to seduce their teacher so they can get a better grade.” “Isn’t that a teacher’s pet?” “No!” _ Ryan is tired of losing every episode of Puppet History and asks Shane to tutor him. Shane obliges and tries to keep the tutoring session on track even as they distract each other.

Cerys:

The Hierophant by carrieonfighting | T, 94K, complete

“So kids, for the last week, we’ve been discussing the fundamentals of duelling.” Shane lounged easily against his desk, robes hanging open haphazardly. Ryan snorted to himself, sitting at the back of the huge room, and he saw Shane’s ear twitch.

“So today, now that I have a partner, it seems like a fantastic time to demonstrate!” He announced. It was Ryan’s turn to twitch. “Professor Bergara is your new Divination teacher, he’ll be starting his classes after the weekend. Please stand up, Professor.”

“E-excuse me?” Ryan said, turning terribly red.

In which Ryan sees the future and moves to Scotland, meets his hero and isn't impressed, hears strange noises in the night, and interrogates some ghosts. After all these years, the castle still keeps its secrets.

A Gentleman of Spirit by breathtaken | E, 21K, complete

Newly impoverished and grieving the loss of his father, Mr Shane Madej is only attending Lady Bergara’s ball at Walcot Hall so that he can write an anonymous report on it for one of the gossip columns. He isn’t expecting to find the Baronet of Walcot’s eldest son – as rich and handsome as he is eccentric – attempting to contact a spirit behind the coach house; he certainly isn’t expecting to fall in love.

Juice:

Do I have a crush? by Dippingmytoesindreams | T, 2K, complete

No, he does not. AKA, Buzzfeed Violet’s Crush series, but make it shyan

Oh, Ryan by VictoriaAGrey | T, 10K, complete

Ryan thinks the holiday season is going to be a predictable affair until Ned calls in a two year old debt Ryan owes him. Honoring that two year old debt sets into motion an avalanche of bad decisions and miscommunications that land Ryan at his parent's house on Christmas Day with a baby and a best friend pretending to be his boyfriend.

Did he also mention Shane's living with him?

Rowan:

tender violet blue by 2many2spirits | E, 7K, complete

“Why’d you do it this time?”

“You asked,” Shane says with a shrug, and the enormity of the statement hits Ryan in the chest with a two-second delay, almost knocking the air from his lungs. Ryan’s never prepared for the way Shane can deliver absolutely devastating blows in the most casual way. It’s one of his most charming qualities. “And you’re so small, I couldn’t let you get hit by a wave and pulled out to sea on my watch. Linda would kill me. I’d have to walk back to LA.”

or; the intricate ritual is skinny dipping

(no actual rituals happen)

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered Am I by colazitron | E, 17K, complete

Look, just because Ryan looks good dressed as Indiana Jones, or dressed in various other things, and just because Shane maybe has a feeling or two about it, doesn't mean it's a thing, okay? Shane's got this.

Or: 5 times Shane had a feeling about Ryan's outfit, +1 time he did something about it

Nicole:

Like Wildfire by makemadej | E, 20K, complete

“Is this gonna be a thing with you?” Ryan demands. “You can’t keep committing to stuff that no one else knows about! When people online say they want you to be more open and vulnerable, this is not what they mean.”

“I know!” Shane wails. “I fucked up.”

“Again,” Ryan points out, which is true but really not necessary.

(Or: the one where Shane accidentally tells Ryan's mom they're a couple and they commit to the bit)

Nicole’s Note: The first Shyan fic I ever read, which was my intro to the ship and the reason I joined the SSS!! 

The Weird 'Verse by Little_Bunny | M, 169K, complete

It really started for a stupid reason, and that stupid reason was the Ohio State Penitentiary.

But then, things got set into motion, and before they knew it, the relationship between Ryan and Shane had changed in relatively subtle but hugely important ways. Ways that are a little weird. Ways that nobody had expected, although Sara had given her full, unwavering support.

Well... Maybe Curly had suspected something. But honestly, Curly got the gossip before God herself, so... That was nothing new.

Nicole’s Note: Queerplatonic Shyan/Shyanara with some of the best characterisation I’ve ever read!! You know a fic is good when you end up with tons of your own headcanons for the universe it’s set in 

we hope you enjoy our recs! as always, leave comments and kudos on fics you like - those mean a lot to authors! and feel free to let us know if you have any recs!

- the mod team

#mod ve #fic finds #mod fic recs #shyan #buzzfeed unclean #buzzfeed after dark #shyan shipping society