#more frequently Ruth does this to me

[a-big-apple]

Gideon, Harrow, and "Wedding Vows"

i frequently see the interpretation that this:

"The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee," said Gideon. (GtN 438)

plus this:

"If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten," her mouth was saying. "Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee." And, unsteadily: "Griddle." (HtN 360)

plus this:

It didn't even matter when Kiriona said, "Sure, Cam. Marry a moron, then die. I get the urge." (NtN 372)

equals Gideon and Harrow are married! crying face emoji!

i'm not disparaging that interpretation, i think it's valid and has some basis in the text, and even if it wasn't/didn't, i think fans should have all the fun they want. but for me, it doesn't fully capture the complexity of what Gideon and Harrow are to each other, and i want to explore a slightly less straightforward reading.

Catholic weddings, vows, and Ruth under the cut ;)

Gideon and Ninth House traditions

let's start with Gideon quoting Ruth. i've seen folks repeating the idea that this is a wedding vow. it's more accurate to say that this is a verse often used as a wedding vow, in other denominations of Christianity, and secularly as well. but in a (traditional) Catholic wedding, the couple can't write or choose their own vows--the Celebration of Matrimony has specific text, with one or two variations, that is always used.

now, we haven't seen a Ninth House marriage ceremony. if we do see such a thing in AtN and discover that Ruth 1:17 is part of that tradition, i will cry a million happy queer tears about it. but i think it's somewhat likely that Gideon has never even seen a Ninth House wedding, given how small and trending elderly the population is, and that we know no couples in her lifetime have had kids other than the Reverend Parents.

what i'm getting at here is that this quotation from Ruth doesn't seem, to me, to represent something that's religiously or traditionally binding in Ninth House culture. it uses some similar language to Catholic marriage vows, "until death do us part" etc, but i don't think these are words that make them married in the eyes of the Ninth or the Houses at large, i think these are words Gideon has chosen as a specific expression of her devotion. and where does she get them from, if not some Ninth House ceremony or scripture?

well, this is a slightly longer stretch, but at the point in the story when Gideon says this, she's already dead. Harrow has begun to absorb her--and thanks to "The Unwanted Guest," we know that souls are porous, permeable, and rub off on each other when they're in contact. Gideon's soul is at this moment being integrated into Harrow's; Harrow has certainly read all kinds of books on the Ninth ranging from usual to totally heretical, some of them probably extremely old, and it's not unreasonable to think writings from before the Resurrection might have been copied and recopied into something Harrow could access. And speaking of soul permeability, Harrow's had Alecto's soul clinging onto hers for seven years, and Alecto's soul is in intimate contact with John's soul--there are so many ways for this bit of scripture to make its way into Gideon's non-corporeal mouth. the STI (Soulfully Transmitted Infection) of biblical knowledge.

Ruth in context

now let's talk a little about Ruth, the book of the Bible and also the character of the Bible, and Naomi, who she is swearing her devotion to. tl;dr, Naomi and her husband and two grown sons are Israelites who immigrate to Moab, a "pagan" nation, to escape famine. Naomi's two sons marry Moabite women; then the sons both die, as does Naomi's husband. Naomi, having lost everything, decides to return home where she'll be penniless and have a bad life but at least she'll be among her people; she tells her two daughters-in-law to go back to their families. One of them goes.

The other, Ruth, refuses, and swears beautiful devotion to Naomi, as we've heard Gideon quote: "She answered: Be not against me, to desire that I should leave thee and depart: for whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee."

in a biblical context, this has nothing to do with a wedding vow. Ruth is promising to leave the comfort of her own people, religion, and homeland to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi, even though the connection they had (Naomi's son, Ruth's husband) is gone, and all they have to look forward to is a terrible life of grief and bitterness. this is frequently interpreted as a parallel to Jesus, who (in the religious perspective) made the sacrifice of leaving his place with God and becoming human out of devotion to humanity, in order to live and suffer and redeem us. woof, this is giving me flashbacks to CCD.

of course, many Christians resist interpreting what passes between Ruth and Naomi as resembling a wedding vow for homophobic reasons too--making it about Jesus is a way to make it less queer--but i think the point still stands that this is a more complicated, and less marriage-related, expression of love than it seems taken on its own.

Harrow's lamentation

when Harrow later echoes it back, she conflates it with a different biblical quotation: "On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion. How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy."

it's a lament, an expression of mourning, a longing for home from someone who has been forcibly removed from it. when combined with the Ruth quotation, in which Ruth is giving up her home in her devotion, this really reads to me as both Harrow's grief, immediate and overpowering, and a realization that Gideon is her home, and failing to acknowledge that is as disabling as the loss of a hand or of the power of speech. Gideon is the beginning of her joy, and Harrow is, in this moment, putting Gideon above the Ninth House in her devotion. above Alecto. above everything.

and again, i'm not saying all of that can't be about marriage, but it's about a relationship much more complicated than marriage can encompass in the context House cultural norms.

Kiriona Gaia, saddest girl

this brings me to Kiriona, and "marry a moron, then die." consider the context of this, and the tone. Kiriona's deeply, deeply hurt. the saddest girl in the universe. she died for Harrow, avowed her devotion to Harrow, and then (from her perspective) was rejected; buried; excised from Harrow's brain and then from her body. Kiriona, as she did when she was Gideon, covers her emotions with humor and sarcasm. i suspect she's even less able to handle being vulnerable as Kiriona than she ever was before. she's making light of Canaan House and what happened there, and it's only in sarcastically downplaying what she's been through that she recounts her relationship to Harrow as a marriage--something she has almost no positive examples of, something that is in her experience frequently political and joyless. also notably, she frames it as a marriage that occurred before she died.

Their actual vow

what Gideon (and Kiriona) really wants--she tells us over and over again--is to be a true cavalier.

and what does Gideon's ghost repeat right before she devastates us with Ruth 1:17?

"One flesh, one end," said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing. Harrow said, "Don't leave me." (GtN 438)

it's taken me a dozen paragraphs just to propose that this is their vow. "One flesh, one end" are the actual words that need to be spoken, in Gideon and Harrow's cultural context, to bring them into an official union with each other; a union that is arguably more fundamental in the Houses, and certainly more complicated, than a marriage. a union Gideon specifically wants, and has seen in action.

in the pool, they vow to each other as cavalier and necromancer. in the moments before Gideon's death, she forgives Harrow again, and exposes her heart: "'You know I only care about you,' she said in a brokenhearted rush" (GtN 430). then she repeats their oath again, acknowledges the pain she's about to cause for Harrow, and rededicates herself to the Ninth--a place she never really belonged, Harrow's home and people more than her own, as Ruth dedicated herself to Naomi's home and people. Gideon "married" her moron in the pool, and now she dies to fulfill that vow.

and as we saw above, after Gideon's death, she reminds Harrow again of their union--of its importance, of how she's fulfilling what she has interpreted to be her whole purpose as a cavalier--and it's in response to Harrow's "don't leave me" that Gideon offers a final reassurance of her devotion. in her mind, this sacrifice is its ultimate expression, the most inextricable and undeniable union two people can achieve.

Gideon believes she'll be part of Harrow forever.

#the locked tomb #the locked tomb meta #i stayed up way too late last night writing this

[jungk0oksthighs]

Over The Odds | Celebration

Pairing - jungkook x reader

Genre - smut, angst, fluff, S2L, ceo!jungkook, sugardaddy!jungkook

Word count - 4.6k

Your family host a welcome home dinner for Ruth

warnings: swearing, drunk (consensual) sex, oral (f receiving), fingering, dom!jk, daddy!jk, bratty oc, rough sex, squirting, choking 

Y/N: Pls tell me you’re still coming I can’t do this alone

Jungkook: I’m on my way, 5 mins tops

The return of your beloved sister has prompted your parents to host a warm and wonderful family meal, except that it’s neither of those things, not for you anyway. You’re sat at the family dining table debating meaningless scenarios with your dad, as you usually do when you’re together, drinking wine. You’re currently discussing ‘does eating a whole punnet of grapes as a snack makes somebody extremely healthy, or extremely unhealthy?’, impatiently tapping your bare foot on the hard dining room floor, waiting for your boyfriend to rescue you from this hell.

It's not that you don’t want to be here, you do, your parents have calmed down about the whole sex tape scandal now and so being in their company is fine – your dad’s even looking forward to meeting Jungkook, whereas a few weeks ago he would’ve probably used his head as a makeshift dartboard given the chance. As always your mum’s her lively self, already drunk from guzzling two bottles of cheap wine by… six pm. It’s very entertaining though, watching her slur her words and dance around to her favourite songs that blast from the Alexa.

Your parents aren’t the problem at all, they never are, Ruth and her boyfriend Seokjin are. Whether it’s intentional or not they keep speaking over you every time you open your mouth, Ruth’s even undermined you in front of your parents at least four times in the last hour. They do look sickeningly good together though, like winners of the genetic lottery or some kind of freaky lab experiment to make the perfect couple. Seokjin is…nice. Much like your own boyfriend he’s a CEO, apparently the daughters of this family have a type, and he’s funny, funny enough to make your mum almost piss her pants more than once – that being said she has drank two bottles of wine already so it’s somewhat of an easy feat.

“Is he even coming?” Ruth snort-laughs into her wine glass, glaring at you from across the table that’s covered in cold meats, cheeses, grapes and wine. Even though she’s wearing a very short green dress she’s sitting on Seokjin’s knee, who’s whispering sweet nothings into her pierced ears. In front of your parents none the less.

“He’s on his way.” You say with a deep inhale, blood pressure increasing from your sisters attitude.

Seokjin is drunk, that’s a given, your mother has poured everything alcoholic into his system and danced with him enough times to prove the fact. The skin on his face is redder than it was when he first arrived, but he’s still very handsome – probably the best looking boyfriend your sisters ever had, and there’s been plenty. His hair is almost black, parted in the centre of his forehead similar to the way Jungkook’s is sometimes, he has wide shoulders and looks like he works out frequently, the pink shirt he's wearing is struggling to contain his large frame.

“Look who’s here!” Your mum sings loudly, dragging your boyfriend through the hallway and into the dining room. You were so lost in thought that you hadn’t even heard the doorbell ring – oops.

“Hello, is everyone okay?” Jungkook’s doe-eyes make you weak at the knees, immediately relaxing in your chair. He’s come straight from work, his black suit and crisp white shirt is a dead giveaway. He’s holding two bottles of wine, presumably one red and one white, or at least he was before your hawk-eyed mother takes them from him with a drunken grin.

You watch him make his way across the room in a few short strides, not to you, but to your father sitting on the chair to your left. He leans down and shakes his hand with warm yet serious eyes, “It’s nice to finally meet you sir.”

“Likewise, you’re probably my favourite person in this room.” Your dad chuckles, returning the handshake.

“Oh?” Jungkook bares his perfectly straight white teeth in an almighty panty-dropping smile as he sits down on your right, unbuttoning his suit jacket, “I’ll take that.”

“You’re dating my youngest and you’ve given my oldest a career, of course you’re my favourite.” He winks, playfully pointing at your boyfriend a few times before passing him a glass of red wine. “And please call me Charlie.”

“Thank you.” He nods, finally settling his gaze on you and the black Bardot-style dress you’re wearing, lingering on your bare shoulders for a little too long to be considered an accident, “You look nice.”

You snort in return, you know just as much as he does that if your parents weren’t in the room right now he would’ve said something entirely different. His eyes flicker to your cleavage for a split second before he starts drinking, clearing his throat and frowning at the taste of cheap alcohol. You laugh again, this time gripping his free hand under the table as you wonder if he’s ever experienced a delicacy quite like a £5 special offer bottle of wine from the local corner shop.

“Are you okay?” You ask him, amused.

“Always am, how are you?” His voice doesn’t have you convinced, nor do his pinched brows. It’s obvious he hates the wine and he’s just trying to be polite, but you let it go.

“I’m good thanks, dad and I were just having a debate about grapes.”

“Oh? Do tell.” He says, eagerly looking between you both.

You smile, jokingly rolling your eyes, “So if a person eats a full punnet of grapes—”

“Jungkook! This is Seokjin.” Ruth shouts proudly, cupping her boyfriend’s slightly pink face, “He’s the CEO of Kim Market, you know the online Asian snack store?”

At this Jungkook grips your hand a little tighter, looking across the table, “Right, I thought I recognised you. I’ve seen you at fundraisers in the past, nice to see you again. I hope business is going well.” He turns back to you with loving eyes, “I’m sorry, carry on.”

“If a person eats a full punnet of grapes,” You repeat yourself, feeling a little dazed from all the wine and annoyed that you were rudely interrupted, “Does that make them healthy or unhealthy?”

“Healthy.” He says with confidence and a small nod, “It’s fruit.”

“That’s exactly what I said!” You’re beaming brightly, maybe even seeming a little smug when you give your dad a look that screams ‘I told you so’.

“No, because it’s a full punnet, we’re not talking about one or two grapes Y/N we’re talking about a big bag of them.” Your dad half-scolds and half-sighs, he’s not going to drop this any time soon.

“Right,” Jungkook’s quick to jump to your defence, letting your hand go to drape his arm over the back of your chair, “But if I eat a lot of grapes that’s at least two of my five a day, whereas if I eat a lot of chocolate… Well I’ve just eaten a lot of chocolate, counts for nothing. And grapes are less calories.”

“Mmm.” Your dad mulls this information over with a serious expression, you’re looking between them with a pained slightly embarrassed smile, “I can see why you’re a CEO son. You’re smart.”

Son. Your chest swells.

“Of course he’s smart, he hired me.” Ruth gloats, winning your mother to tut and roll her eyes beside her. Similarly to you when your mum’s had even just a drop of alcohol she can’t hold back, always showing and saying what’s on her mind and getting herself into trouble. You stifle a laugh as she mouths something that looks like ‘here we go again’ to you.

“Actually I had no input in recruiting the new employees, my assistant Hoseok was the one who hired you.” Much to your surprise Jungkook shuts your sister down, and you have to catch your jaw before it falls to the ground.

“A CEO that doesn’t have any input with recruitment?” She challenges him with a face of thunder. The room is silent, save for the music and Jungkook’s small but low chuckle.

“It’s not uncommon for the owner of a company to be busy, so our assistants tend to lighten our workload. Right Seokjin?” Your boyfriend grins, and it’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever witnessed in your entire life, “I can imagine you’re much too busy at Kim Market to do the interview and enrolment process for all its new employees.”

“I have a specific recruitment team that take care of things like that.” Seokjin admits with a small nod, ignoring the way your sister visibly tenses on top of him, “You’re right, I don’t have the time either!” He laughs, as does everybody else – save for Ruth.

“It’s just if I were a CEO I’d want to be more careful about who I employ.” She bites, but the man sitting next to you doesn’t fold.

“I trust my assistant, he wouldn’t be my assistant otherwise,” His tongue pops the inside of his cheek and if you could’ve jumped his bones right there and then, blown away by this…assertiveness you haven’t seen in him for so long, “Besides like your boyfriend said, it’s not that we don’t want to we just don’t have the time. But we shouldn’t be talking about work right now, so sorry how rude of me. How’s everyone’s day been?”

You zone out of the conversation completely, Jungkook’s talking to your mum about something relating to the price of wine at the local corner shop but you can’t bring yourself to listen. Fuck. He is without a doubt the definition of the perfect man – sitting there in a suit, putting your sister in her place, getting along with your family, actually listening to what you have to say, looking as good as he does… You’re in awe, the only thing you can think about is how badly you want him right now. On top of you, underneath you, behind you. You want him, all of him. Now.

“Y/N?” Your dad’s voice tears you from your vivid borderline illegal daydream that infringes almost all of the man’s human rights.

“Sorry what did you say?” You’re flustered, facing your father with an apologetic eyes.

“How’s the job search going?” He asks again, genuinely interested.

“Oh,” You sigh, you haven’t even been interviewed for any of the jobs you’d applied for, all it takes is one quick Google search of your name to see why, “I’ll find something soon.” You offer him a weak, reassuring smile.

“You know McDonald’s is always hiring Y/N.” Ruth winks, downing the rest of her drink.

At this your mum visibly loses it, shaking her head in disbelief, “Ruth.” She scolds her with a knowing look you’ve seen one too many times throughout your life, “Your sister has the same qualifications as you—”

“And she’s done nothing with them, yet I’m the bad guy?” Your older sibling reminds her, and you, and everyone else of how life hasn’t given you the same opportunities as her.

Jungkook’s frowning with a tense jaw as though he’s having an internal debate before he breaks the silence, “You know I could give you a job. I’m sure Hoseok would love to show someone as smart as you the ropes of what we do at JI.”

“You’re not giving me a job,” You say quietly, facing him, “I’ll find something soon.”

“Oh I know you will,” He smiles, a genuine confident smile because he believes in you, his fingertips lightly graze your back, “But if you ever want a backup option I’m happy to help.”

“I wouldn’t call Jeon Industries a backup option,” Seokjin scoffs, wide-eyed, “It’s one of the most profitable companies on the planet, didn’t you make the Forbes thirty under thirty list this year? For the fourth year in a row?”

Where most people would and rightfully should brag about something like that, Jungkook deflects with a shrug, “All I’m saying is if nothing comes up, we’d be happy to have you.”

As the night progresses both you and Jungkook drink a lot of wine, courtesy of your mother who made sure neither one of your glasses ever made it to being empty. Conversation flows freely between your group and your heart bursts with pride at how likeable and genuine Jungkook’s personality remains throughout the night, even when he himself is equally as drunk as you. Yoongi picks you up and takes you to the familiar penthouse apartment around midnight, and soon you find yourself slamming your boyfriend’s back against the first wall you find inside.

“Whoa, Y/N…” He chuckles breathlessly against your lips, his inked fingers tangled in your hair.

You’re kissing him feverishly, desperately, passionately – you want him now. The alcohol has ridded you of any insecurity you felt before, it’s been so long since you’ve had sex that you’re already moaning against his mouth in anticipation. Feeling brazen you snake your hand down to his clothed crotch, palming his hardening cock.

“Baby you’ve been drinking.” He groans with eyes squeezed shut as if he’s having an internal moral debate, though he doesn’t stop you.

“So have you.” You argue, breath still smelling like wine as you continue to kiss him.

“Ah-,” He hisses, hips subconsciously buckling into your hand for more friction, “I don’t want you to regret this tomorrow.”

“I won’t.” You state matter-of-factly, slipping your tongue into his warm mouth.

At this Jungkook grips your bare shoulders and pulls you away from him, his hooded eyes are stained pink from alcohol but you can still make out the burning desire that’s darkening his irises. He’s panting, trying to catch his breath ever since you literally pinned him up and knocked it out of him, “We haven’t done this since… Yknow.”

“So stop talking and get on with it.” You say half annoyed, half flirtatiously, your voice low and oozing seduction, “I want you Jungkook… I want you so bad, touch me…” You whisper, leaning into his neck where you start planting lewd kisses, small bites and sucks.

You feel his Adams apple bob in his throat, along with the vibration of a small growl, “Such a fucking brat.” He rasps, gripping your waist.

You take this an encouragement and kiss his mouth again, messily, shamelessly moaning against him. He’s not even attempting to stop you anymore and judging by the hold he has on your body you know he wants this just as much as you do, maybe more. Within a matter of minutes you’re pressed down against the familiar smell of his mattress, you’re so concentrated on how his body feels on top of yours that you don’t even remember getting to his bedroom.

“Please...” You whimper, head spinning from how good this feels and he hasn’t even touched you yet.

“So fucking needy.” He smirks against you triumphantly and it feels as though time slows down when he rids you both of any clothes, tossing them to the ground, leaving you needy and naked. There’s no time to be insecure about anything because he’s making his way down your bare body with a long lick of his tongue, leaving a sinful and shiny trail of saliva from your neck to your core.

“Jungkook…” You whine, your shaky hands coming down to nestle between his raven locks, you’re already wet and throbbing for his touch, his breath is hot against your most sensitive area.

Your boyfriend hooks his arms under your legs, pulling you impossibly closer to his waiting face where he spits on your womanhood, making a loud slurping noise as he mercilessly attacks your swollen clit with his mouth without warning. A piercing shriek escapes you as he smothers his face in your pussy, shaking his head as he sucks the sensitive bundle of nerves.

“You’re fucking perfect.” He murmurs against you, doubling his efforts until the speed he’s created has your back arching from the bed, gasping for air. You push your hips up to his mouth, already addicted to how fucking good this feels.

The alcohol in your system surprisingly doesn’t dull your senses, no, you feel everything he’s doing to you. You’re so fucked out in a state of total bliss already that you don’t notice him pulling his left hand from your hip, not until he plunges at least two fingers into your sopping heat with an audible squelch.

“Fuck!” You sob, the stretch and new sensation of being filled with his digits has you reeling, “Don’t stop, don’t fucking stop! Oh-” Your cries are louder than you expected presumably because you’re tipsy, you’re so loud that it surprises you both.

Jungkook takes your pleas as further encouragement, immediately curling his fingers inside you over and over quickly, making sure to hit your sweet spot each and every time, all while he sucks and licks your clit even harsher. You’re a mess, your limbs are trembling and your hearts beating so fast you fear it might give out at any moment, this feels fucking amazing.

“Do you like this? Mm?” The vibrations of his voice against you has you squeezing your eyes shut, throwing your head back into the pillows with a low groan. “Do you like it when I suck this pretty little clit?”

“My god-,” You’re silently laughing in disbelief as your orgasm is already approaching, he’s fucking incredible. He’s so good at this, he knows your body like the back of his hand.

“Answer me baby.” He plunges his digits into your creamy walls particularly hard.

“Fuck yes!” Your chest is heaving up and down, the cool air swirling your nipples and only upping the ante of his ministrations, “Daddy don’t stop!” The word drags itself out before you can stop it, and he loses it, a possessive growl rattling his strong chest before he adds a third finger to your wetness, licking you so sloppily and fast that real tears prick your eyes at the overstimulation.

“Come for me baby, come all over my fucking face.” He moans, he can feel your walls tightening around his knuckles, his hand and chin are dripping with your arousal and he’s never been more turned on in his life.

“Please,” Is all you manage to choke out, throwing your hands up to your head where they desperately grip the hairs at your scalp as a white hot heat approaches you, “I’m gonna-,”

Jungkook slows his movements, his tongue is flat and wet against your clit as he circles the area, his fingers rocking in and out of you at a leisurely pace. But this doesn’t stop your orgasm, instead it heightens the pleasure as he drags out the final moments of your euphoria, until you’re coming undone, squirting all over him and the sheets below in sync with your pulsating pussy and a high-pitched scream that sounds like his name.

“You’re fucking amazing.” He mumbles into your sopping folds, gently cleaning up the mess he’s made with his ever so talented tongue.

You almost black out from the feeling but somehow find the strength to drag your hands down to his hair, pulling him up to your face and greeting it with heavy, open-mouthed kisses. The taste of you is all over his tongue as it swirls against yours, his lips and chin are shiny and drenched with your come but you don’t care.

“Fuck me, please fuck me.” You pant hopelessly against him, gripping the base of his thick shaft and lining it up with your throbbing hole. He tries to bite back a moan when you grip his hips and push him into you, he effortlessly slides in, you’re so hot and tight around him that he shuts his eyes, burying his head into the crook of you neck.

“Oh-, baby…” He tucks his lip between his teeth, the after taste of you only drives him crazier.

“Fuck me daddy…” You say again, somewhat breathlessly and quiet.

To this he pulls back, his blackened eyes set on you as he holds his weight with one hand and clasps the other round your throat.

You’re both lost in the moment when he starts hammering into your wet pussy, his insane stamina coming into play as he snaps his hips harder and harder, giving you no time to adjust to his massive size. The squelching and slapping noises only add more fuel to his fire and soon he’s fucking you relentlessly into the mattress with a firm hold of your neck, reminding you just how dominant he can be when he wants to be.

“Shit,” A throaty groan escapes him, hungrily watching your body jolt and bounce with each thrust, thankfully the wine doesn’t seem to have affected his capabilities either, “You feel--, fuck baby.”

“Oh my god-,” Your eyes roll back as he repeatedly hits the same sinful spot inside you with his cock, until you’re gushing onto the bed in spurts of slick, coming around his girth.

You watch Jungkook pull back just enough to look between your bodies at the pornographic mess he’s making of you, his mouth agape as he moans a string profanities, finally settling his eyes back to you. “Fuck Y/N,” He releases the grip on your neck, hoisting one of your legs over his shoulder, keeping it in place with his palm flat on the back of your knee.

“Kook!” You cry, your body feeling as though it’s on cloud fucking nine as he plunges into you even deeper. It’s hard to think of the reasons you’ve been putting this off, right now the only thing on your brain is how amazing he feels inside you, and how your skin tingles with electricity where he touches you.

Jungkook looks to be having the same thoughts as you, his features contorted with pleasure as the crown of his cock slams into your cervix with each feral snap of his hips. This feels too good, he never wants it to end.

“Do you like it when I fuck you like this? Hm?” He croaks between grunts and groans, his voice an octave deeper to what it usually is.

“Y-yes. Fuck, yes!”

His movements turn sloppy, messy, even a little misguided as his arms give out and his body falls on top of yours, his rock hard abs making a slapping sound as they meet your stomach. He’s still fucking you though, his face is hot against your neck, “Shit. You’re gonna make me come—” He cuts his admission short to lick and bite the flesh of your earlobe.

“I love you Jungkook.” You whisper, fingernails digging into his shoulder blades.

Your heartfelt confession pulls him over the edge, until he bottoms out as hot bursts of his come shoot into your walls. He’s sweating, his hair is damp against his glistening forehead as he rides out the wave of ecstasy with the occasional roll of his hips. The room is otherwise silent as you both try and catch your breath, you cling onto his tanned frame for dear life as your body trembles from the aftermath of having your brains fucked out.

He peels his head away from your neck, his hooded eyes are drowning with emotion as he stares down at you through dark eyelashes.

“I love you too Y/N,” He shakes his head with a grin, still breathless, “I love you so fucking much.”

When you wake the next morning you’re greeted with Jungkook’s sleepy smile, somehow, during the night you’ve ended up sharing the same silk pillow. His face is close, close enough for him to gently kiss you before you’re fully awake. His lips against yours prompt you to kiss him back with a soft chuckle, eventually pulling back to look at him.

“Good morning.” You hum, rubbing the sleep from your eyes.

“Good morning beautiful.” His smile reaches his doe-eyes before it tugs the corners of his lips, “Are you hungover?”

Surprisingly enough you feel fine but your body is aching far worse than your head, “No I’m okay,” You admit with a lazy morning voice, “How are you feeling?”

“Like the luckiest guy in the world.” He grins, pulling you into his strong arms for a morning snuggle.

You’re so comfortable and content against his warm body that you almost doze off again, feeling nothing but loved. But the feeling of his morning erection pressing against you causes you to laugh, there’s absolutely no way you can handle another round with him right now you’re so sore.

“Not happening,” Your shoulders bounce, “Not yet anyway.”

“Ignore him, he’s just excited that there’s a naked girl in my bed.”

“Mmm,” You laugh again, gazing up at him, “Well you’d better kick her out before I find her and kill her.”

To this Jungkook lolls his head back with a silent giggle, “I don’t know if the idea of there being two of you turns me on or scares the shit out of me. You’re a handful as it is.”

“Just stop talking.”

“See what I mean?” His brow quirks knowingly, “You’re so bossy.”

You choose to ignore him and settle back into his chest, your arm messily thrown over his small waist. There’s a dull vibration coming from somewhere in the room that disturbs your peace and wins you to groan. You might not be hungover but you’re not much of a morning person either, and you’ve decided that whoever’s calling right now is going to get an ear full of your wrath.

“Is that my phone or yours?” You ask, not bothering to move.

“Mine I think,” He sighs, “Hang on.”

And just like that he gets out of bed, making sure to drape the covers back over you before he searches for his discarded suit trousers. Eventually he finds them and grabs his phone, you feel like a pervert for watching him stand at the foot of the bed entirely naked and hard – his toned, tattooed body is a sight you’re never going to get used to. He’s perfect.

“I’ll be right back, I’ve got nine missed calls from Tae,” He chuckles to himself, glancing at you with a small smile, “Do you want a coffee? I got some blonde blend in for you.”

“God, yes please.” You stretch on the bed, every muscle in your body aching.

But when he returns to the bedroom he doesn’t have a coffee for you, instead his sharp profile is blanketed with concern and confusion as he sits on the edge of the bed in grey sweatpants.

“What’s wrong?” You sense the shift in atmosphere immediately, covering your bare chest with the bed sheets when you sit up. “Is everything okay?”

“That was Taehyung…” He’s quiet, putting you further on edge, “The police finally traced the IP address from the video leak.” Your heart drops into the depths of your stomach, reality crashing down onto you like a tonne of bricks. Jungkook swallows, cocking his head to one side with a frown.

“The video was leaked from your apartment Y/N.”

x

#oto #jungkook #jungkook ff #jungkook series #jungkook oneshot #jungkook drabble #jungkook imagine #jungkook reaction #jungkook scenario #jungkook x reader #jungkook x reader smut #jungkook x y/n #ceo!jungkook #sugardaddy!jungkook #boyfriend jungkook #rich!jungkook #jungkook au #bts au #bts x reader #seokjin #yoongi #namjoon #jimin #taehyung #hoseok #jungk0oksthighs #smut series #kpop ff #kpop series #bts ff

[ride-thedragon]

How it feels like being a fan of Afro-Futurism and Afro Surrealism watching Hotd.

I just want to understand, you know.

You get to make a change with this very famous series and add diversity to have Corlys in the same shirt for 26 years? (Corlys being such a baddie but refusing to change accessories for the outfit?)

We lived in a world where Ruth Carter had won her Oscar for Black Panther and you dress them like every other bitch at the height of their power?

This isn't even about them being black because they aren't in this world. But, what they are is a massive trade house that's frequently leading explorations all over the world.

Why is Laena in a Baratheon type dress in Pentos?

Why are her girls having dinner with the Pentoshi Prince in clothes very similar to their night gowns?( I didn't know it was different outfits. I just found that out.)

Why does young Rhaena have more costume changes in one night than teen Rhaena has in days?

It would've been so fun to make house Velayron distinctly noble, using non European inspiration at similar time periods.

You could've had the added element of Jace, Luke, and Joffery in Velayron clothes that obviously don't suit them when they were young and as they grow up lean more to the Targs and Velayrons respectively. Instead, we choose color distinctions.

I try to be kind, but this still hurts me.

#hotd #house of the dragon #hotd critical #house velaryon #for the Velaryon boys to be dressed in targ colors when they go to back their claims..... #for luke not to be on Driftmark.... #hotd fashion #im still confused

[mzannthropy]

Tell me why you dislike the Emily trilogy please because I'm rereading it!!

It's more of a difficult relationship, rather than disliking it; there are many parts that I like about Emily. Like, the majority of it is good. But it drives me CRAZY! It's the way LMM wrote, and the choices she made in the Emily series.

(Sorry if it's ranty and incoherent, it's the first time I've properly wrote down all my thoughts & feelings on Emily.)

So first of all, what the hell is it with all the preachy, patronising BS? This is not LMM's usual style, which is why it's so bewildering. The narrator frequently breaks the fourth wall to tell us how she's not there to defend Emily, but to merely chronicle her life and I want to say, I don't need you to defend Emily, Lucy Maud, I can make my own mind for myself, thank you! She doesn't do it in Anne (also a story of an orphan being taken in), and as far I can remember, she doesn't do it in any of her other writing. It reminds me of Little Women a lot. And from me that's not a compliment.

Then, I say it outright as it is: I loathe Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Ruth and I think they're both child abusers. Aunt Ruth, especially, is a tyrant. She's a dictator. Her constantly calling Emily "sly" with no evidence and then after that incident with Perry and the kiss, when they hold a family court, she says "I would have believed you if you had told the truth", can you get any more textbook abuser? I have this thing when I cannot handle someone not being believed (also due to something that I went through), it triggers me, and a person (esp of authority) determined to disbelieve you and think the worst of you when it's just not true sends me to a rage. Aunt Elizabeth is a vile, cruel, narrow-minded woman, who should not be allowed near children. If the narrative ever condemned these women, it would be a much better reading experience. But it doesn't. Right to the very end, the last page, the second to last paragraph, when Emily and Teddy finally, FINALLY, find each other, Ruth still calls Emily sly. Worst of it is that Emily really doesn't do anything remotely wicked. She's essentially a good kid. What would these hags do if they saw today's teenagers?

"You are always writing yards of trash that nobody wants." Quote from Aunt Elizabeth. What a nice, loving aunt! Then they call Emily a Murray when it suits them--when she does something they disapprove of, it's "that Starr coming out in her". Or they say she's "half a Murray" and I'm like, everyone is unless both your parents were Murrays?

Abusive caregivers are no strangers to LMM works, ofc, but they're usually presented as villains and are not the "endgame" caregivers. (Take as an example, little Elizabeth from Windy Poplars.) That's why I like Jane of Lantern Hill, bc here LMM finally admits that an abusive narcissist is an abusive narcissist (the grandmother). And that was 1937, so you know, it took her time to realise that.

So, most of what I'm saying here relates to the second book. Emily of New Moon is not as infuriating and Quest I actually like, despite how it drags, bc it so perfectly depicts the consequences of Emily's choice at the end of Emily Climbs. And here I get to the crux of the matter--the ending of Emily Climbs.

So, Emily has graduated school, has some success with her writing, has had short stories published and at last meets someone who believes in her, who sees her talent as a writer. Janet Royal offers her a job and a place to stay in New York. An opportunity people would sell their literal souls for. And what does Emily do?

She refuses it bc she doesn't want to leave New Moon.

Once again, I repeat. Emily gets offered a job and free accommodation in fucking NEW YORK and she refuses it bc she doesn't want to leave New Moon, that fucking backwards, progress-denying, candle-burning, abuse-filled place in godsforsaken village on PEI.

How is this supposed to be a good storytelling choice??? And this is why I don't think the series will get adapted again. Not without some major changes. Bc I can't imagine how modern audience would react to a heroine rejecting an opportunity of a lifetime, an opportunity many young people today would commit literal CRIMES for--and for what? It's not even that she is doing it to get married and have kids (stupid choice still, but at least more understandable). The end of Climbs makes me so fucking mad, that story with the dog is so stupid and painful to read (YMMV). I want to cry, why, Lucy Maud, whyyyyyyyyyyy *cries unconsolably*

I think it's bc LMM wouldn't have been able to write--or at least she thought she wouldn't have been able to write--a story of a young upcoming female writer in NYC, bc that wasn't her type of story. But in that case, she should not have included that golden opportunity in Climbs at all. Bc why is it there? Emily could have just returned to New Moon after she finished her schooling.

The tragic, Watsonian interpretation is that Emily is merely experiencing effects of her childhood trauma. (If you want to look at it as a tragedy, then it makes it sort of more bearable, if only it was less patronising...)

When she informs Aunt Elizabeth of her decision, the woman's response is: "I thought a Murray would." I thought a Murray would. Not, I'm happy you're staying with us. That tells you everything you need to know.

And this is what's good about Emily's Quest. Bc here, Emily suffers the consequences of her moronic choice. Ilse, Teddy and Perry all leave to chase their fortunes. Imagine Emily left too. The NYC offer was a tad unrealistic, but, had LMM had better ideas, she could have made it a Toronto job instead. Or Halifax. Or just Charlottetown, ffs. Imagine her getting out of the New Moon environment, getting brand new experiences, seeing people not give a slightest fuck that she was a Murray of New Moon. Seeing how, out in the real world, little their majestic family clan matters. But she didn't. And that's why she had to go through what she went through in the last book. Bc she never meets any book/literary people, she puts so much stock in Dean and she believes everything he tells her. She believes him when he tells her that her book is no good, burns her manuscript and in anguish runs out of her room, trips over the sewing basket and----

So ummm, Dean. Of course he's a creep. But it makes sense to me that she's friends with him. She's a vulnerable child, he preys on her. I don't buy that he'd so happily to give her the deeds of the house as a wedding gift, but LMM wanted her happy ending and she never actually wrote Dean as the dangerous predator that he is.

When I read LMM biography The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio, I hoped I would find some answers to things that bother me about Emily--but there weren't any. So, *shrugs* I guess I never will know.

#l.m. montgomery #emily of new moon #this got long #lmmblogging #thank you anyway #it's so good to talk about lmm

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Woo, Autism is Coming for Your Kids - I mean, oh-no

I was just going to say something cute and funny about the societal model of disability today, but I read the news - oh boy - and saw this:

Autism now more common among Black, Hispanic kids in US

Note that the headline is "more common" and when you actually click the article says, "diagnosed more frequently" which is not the same thing!

So let me unpack this for y'all, if you've got the time, and the stomach for a little light discrimination, eugenics, and abuse.

Do you watch or listen to Well, There's Your Problem? Well, you should, but I have the 9/11 episode in mind. You see, about halfway through that episode, the gang find out Ruth Bader Ginsburg just croaked, and Liam... Laughs. He just laughs, like Mark Hamill's Joker, for a disturbingly long time, cradling the desiccated corpse of American Justice in his arms. He can't stop. He doesn't want to stop. Because if he stops, he'll have to think about what's gonna happen.

That is the noise my soul is making as I consume this article, especially this part:

AHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* AHA-AHA-HAA... Ahhh... I have some thoughts.

First of all, EVERYONE is fuckin autistic. OK? You can trust me, I'm an internet stranger. I've diagnosed you, I've labeled your brain, and that ink don't come off. Get on the goddamn short bus with the rest of us, we have seatbelts and snacks. (Full disclosure, I rode the short bus for a few years, it's actually not that fun. Kinda loud, 'cos there are people on there who don't wanna be there and can only express this by crying, moaning, or otherwise melting down. And you're not allowed off.)

That weird, inconvenient thing you do that helps you feel a little bit better and get through your day? Do people look at you funny and want you to stop doing that? Fuckin autism! You're SICK! Get on the bus!

Do you need a little help sometimes with something other people can't easily see and diagnose for themselves - maybe something a little less obvious than missing a major limb? Is it inconvenient for others to give you that help? Fuckin autism! Get on the bus!

Do you need to disengage and destress and do some self-care at times when it's bothersome to other people, or when you're supposed to be cranking out capitalist value in the form of labour or academic achievement? Fuckin autism! I'll save you a seat! You like the window or the aisle? Stop stimming, it makes the underpaid teaching assistant nervous.

Get out of the mainstream, lower your expectations (and your standards) and let us store you somewhere that's a little more convenient for all of us. It's not anyone's fault, there's just something wrong with you (OK, maybe that IS your fault, but it's not society's fault, that's the main thing). Just sit here quietly, accept it, and maybe you can have a juice box - if we can convince the government you're enough of a problem that we need more funding to deal with you. OK?

A spectrum does not consist only of the bright, obvious colours your eye picks up when we go out of our way to filter light through a prism. Some people are ultraviolet - so nonverbal and dissociated and disconnected from this broken world that their parents are using them like human Ouija boards to get the level of social interaction to which "normal" people feel they are entitled. And some people are infrared - they can navigate this broken world with little more than what it's willing to give them, call themselves "normal," and keep their discomfort internal. We teach those people they're not on the spectrum at all, and praise them to high heavens, so they'll see human beings in obvious pain who need help as lesser, "other," pitiable, and sick. Conveniently, it also makes them more likely to hide their pain instead of asking for help when they need it, so they don't become lesser, or "sick." Who wants to be sick?

So when I read that AP article, and my soul howls with crazed laughter, a small, optimistic part of me says: Yay. We're filtering more light through the prism, making prism access more fair, and starting to see just how many people would benefit from being treated with care and compassion - as individuals rather than cogs in a broken machine. Maybe, if we keep it up, we'll begin to understand that light isn't just those bright colours we can see when we press our thumb over the hose nozzle and break the spectrum into pieces. It's all "normal," it all has value, it's always been there, and it's not going away. It's not an aberration that needs correcting, it's just how the world works. Instead of "curing" it or ignoring it, let's work with it.

And the louder part of my brain, the part that is laughing with my soul, says: Oh, look! People noticed that gifted education is fucking racist, so the US education system has found a new way to medicalize being darker than a paper bag! They've turned up a few people who fit well enough on the short bus, so why would they stop there? Wow! Look at all these sick fucking brown people who are genetically disposed to autism! Oh, god, they're expensive. We don't need more! What if we establish some more immigration laws? Or maybe forcibly sterilize them!

Even the optimistic part of my brain can't help but notice the AP seems oddly disdainful of the fact that we've lowered the standards for "autism" from just the really inconvenient ones to children who would benefit from more time, flexibility, and attention. What? Are we gonna start adapting to the needs of children so they can learn and be happy instead of warehousing them all day in preparation for their eventual jobs and kicking out the ones who can't handle it? *rolls eyes* Gawd. Will the "woke"ness never cease?

Ron DeSantis defines "woke," as (I don't wanna look it up, I've cited enough things and I'm tired) something like "an awareness of systemic injustices." So, yeah, I hope the wokeness does not cease. And I hope we start meeting the needs of human beings who exist on this planet with the rest of us - with equity, equality, and no shame.

I just really doubt it's gonna shake out that way, and I can't stop laughing.

#autism #neurodiversity #neurodivergent #news #racisim #discrimination #us education #inclusivity #disability #medicalization #oh god no woke culture i'm so scared vote conservative and hold meee

[shallowsfm]

RUTH WILSON. SHE/HER / have you ever heard of 911 by lady gaga, well, it describes CLAIRE BAUDELAIRE MCCLAIN to a tee! the forty year old, and CONDUCTOR / COMPOSER / PRODUCER (OWNER OF MCCLAIN STUDIOS) was spotted browsing through the stalls at portobello road market last sunday, do you know them? would you say she is more ostentatious or more DEDICATED instead? anyway, they remind me of black roll neck sweater paired with a gold medallion necklace, discarded and empty vintage wine bottles, being the epitome of ardour when working only for fatigue and irritability are welcomed just moments after, the feeling of being overwhelmed and turning off the mobile phone when someone calls more than twice yet feeling hurt when your own calls aren’t picked up, maybe you’ll bump into them soon!

tws: infertility, infidelity, divorce, anxiety, panic attack, anxiety

early life:

claire was actually born in york, yorkshire (but lies that she’s a southerner and that’s what’s on her wiki page!). she’s the eldest of four siblings but the middle child always stepped up and outperformed her in every single way. her mother was a music teacher and her father a chemist. although she was inspired by music, she never decided to take up a music hobby like her siblings and was part of a swimming club instead.

claire had always been conscientious. a student, she’d get easily upset if she did anything wrong and would want to avoid any repercussion from it, even if it was as simple as a note being jotted down to say she’d forgotten one of her workbooks, she’d cry about it.

at school, she was the person who would sing in front of her peers in assembly and be bullied by people because of it. she had always been in a choir and had a good voice but children were cruel and that knocked her confidence massively.

she was around 10 when she decided she wanted to take up some music classes, however, the only one available was in choral conducting. she went from being in the choir to conducting it and she preferred her back to the audience.

conducted her first orchestra when she was 12. was a big of a child prodigy in that respect and went to study in zurich. there was a sense of being a phony considering she'd never played an instrument herself but she'd frequently leave that part out. she understood them through analysis and theory - that was impressive so why was she so embarrassed by it?

there was always an interest in composition, the application of what she considered to be truth.

career:

it was her 'messing around’ in a band that would lead her become a world-renowned composer, with a few oscars and grammys below her belt. it was the perfect amount of being seen but not swarmed as if she were famous and she had got lucky on that front. a very private person, there was only so many red carpet walks she would do.

when it comes to her profession, claire is an obsessive person and does let it consume her from time to time. it does worry her parents but she’s on a lot of money ( ~ £2m per score and she now pays for her parents’ retirement and holiday home so everything must be going great, right? not only would she work her way up to chief conductor for the bbc symphony orchestra, claire would also continue her work as a composer. she's obsessed with music and does find it difficult to switch off.

think of her discography as that of someone like hans zimmer, it’s that style and she can be both impactful and experimental, electronic along with traditional orchestra.

she has also got disney composing and conducting credits for various scores and has been involved in the soundtrack recording of various blockbusters.

earns a couple million upfront for her scores and then any royalties on top of that.

personal life / break down of her marriage:

claire met her now ex-husband when she first moved to london and assumed her role four years ago. she was renting out a small apartment, one that she could easily afford but some of the larger apartments didn’t give her such flexibility when it came to short-term rent. a successful investor, he was incredibly charming. they had a lot to talk about and seemed to appreciate each other’s pace. they were married within the year.

while he seemed to be smitten by her, his parents and friends seemed to be a little harder. she wasn’t from upper-class society (though she had kept her fake london accent when she moved over from london) and although she could hold her own, she was different. she was polite as she had run with these types of crowds, for years, in her line of work but it was never something she was truly happy with.

problems started to arise when he wanted children. claire wasn’t opposed to it and they did try but there were issues, more so on her side. she knew that he definitely felt pressure from his family to carry on the legacy and that pressure was also taken on by claire.

they started the ivf process and it made her feel terrible. while her sick days didn’t increase, the woman didn’t look well throughout it. a couple of months in, she collapsed on the street and was hospitalised.

she had reached her limit. she was in pain and she chose to stop the treatment. her husband was crushed by it and did attempt to change her mind but it didn’t work. the woman was afraid that he’d leave her seen as having a child was something he wanted but he stayed.

there was an obvious rift between them after that. he did look after her, they continued as normal but then he stopped asking her more and more about her work and he seemed either flat or angry when she asked him the same. . she felt like there was something going on and she did feel guilty for it.

around eight months ago, he sat her down after work and gave her the news that he was leaving her. at first, she didn’t believe it but he was serious. he had been in a relationship for the best part of six months and she was pregnant. she tried to convince him that they could work it out but it wasn’t what he wanted.

the aftermath:

he had moved out of the penthouse (rightfully so as it was his fault) but claire's name wasn’t on it. everything felt like it was going to be taken away from her, apart from mcclain studios which she had set up, using his surname, but with only her name on companies house. he had moved in with this new woman, who was slightly younger than her and from an affluent family.

it wasn’t her finest moment when she tried to beg him to come back and after being met with hostility when he used to be the one to comfort her, she stopped trying.

everything felt like it was her fault, that she could have prevented this all from happening if she ‘pushed herself’ to give him what he had wanted. she was so confused as to why he had chosen to stay with her and go behind her back rather than just tell her then and there. unknown to claire, one of her friends found out and said if he didn’t tell her, they would.

anxiousness seemed to follow her wherever she went. she kept the divorce a secret from everyone, scared of being one of those statistics and not wanting to be the brunt of gossip. she hadn’t even told her parents and that caused issues when he took it upon himself to ring them and when they were talking like they were still together, he broke the news. this has caused a lot of contention with her folks back in england.

one morning, claire experienced a panic attack on the subway. someone realised what was happening and attended to her before getting her off at the next stop. it was them who called her work and explained the situation.

she took a few days off her more than busy schedule (distracted herself by perhaps taking on too many projects) but then went back like nothing had happened. the same happened again and it was at that point, she contacted a professional and is currently in therapy.

the woman seemed to completely disappear from society as she isolated herself. three years ago she had won a grammy, the year after than an oscar - what on earth had happened to her life? the divorce was done, she had been given the penthouse in south london, a decision she didn’t quite know the meaning of, and then she was preoccupied with selling it. she’s not managed to find a buyer yet but is renting it out as she lives in nottinghill, closer to her friends.

claire is currently on a leave of absence from her role at the bbc symphony orchestra after she collapsed during a performance.

she's unsure if they'll renew her contract. they've given her no indication that they don't want her back but she feels her professionalism has slipped with her personal issues and she never wanted that to be the case. claire is respected for her crafts and the role that she has but at what cost?

the other bits:

a few months ago, she graced the red carpet again after composing the soundtrack for a hit blockbuster and awaits nominations for that, almost like nothing happened... yet again...

claire really hates going on trains due to her recent experience with them so won’t take them. instead, she gets the bus as she finds it relaxing??? doesn’t want to be that person booking taxis every day or with a private driver. (let’s stop this rich lady taking the bus, yeah?)

her divorce is not yet public but anyone with eyes can see something’s happened there.

she has over 9 million subscribers on spotify.

always playing around with her work, even when she’s not working. whether it be on a laptop or phone. currently remixing her work into club tracks and feels like the urge to dj is her mid-life crisis.

listens to heavy metal/heavy rock and watches documentaries, loves to hate horror.

if she hears her breakout song (her first song that won an award) she cries as it reminds her of a very together part of her life and she feels like things have totally changed.

keeps her awards locked in a safe and not on display.

there will probs be more but this is all i can think of at this moment in time.

#nottinghillintro #infidelity tw #infertility tw #anxiety tw #panic attack tw #divorce tw

[wromwood]

So, earlier this month, I stopped working at one of my part-time jobs. While I still believe it was the best choice, considering how the job’s responsibilities changed since most Broadway theaters stopped requiring vax card checks, I will miss one of the big perks that the job offered: the opportunity to watch Broadway shows for free after shifts.

Now that it’s over, I think it’s time to share the full list of shows that I had the opportunity to see, ranked in order of how much I enjoyed them, from least to most. However, keep in mind that I didn’t think ANY of these plays were necessarily bad, nor did I hate any of them.

Take a moment to remind yourself that this is ranked based on pure enjoyment, and here we go!

Macbeth

Yeahhhh, sorry Daniel Craig, but this production of the Scottish Play definitely made the bottom of the list. (Or top, since we’re going from least to most.)

Again, I didn’t HATE this production, but this show confused me the most, and not in a good way. I’ve read Macbeth before, and I still found this production hard to follow. The staging was simple and vaguely modern, meaning that context and furniture were the main clues as to where any of the characters were at any time. Combine this with frequent double-roles for a lot of the actors, and I often couldn’t place who was speaking, where, and why.

This show was also the play of weird artistic choices. No matter what happened, there was almost always FOG, which worked sometimes, but just seemed to cover up lacking scenery at others. When Macbeth gets stabbed at the end, he seems to get stabbed in the crotch, and the spray of blood seems to come directly out of his butthole. When dramatic/spooky things happen, they LOUDLY blare what sounds like the Psycho knife screech, which just made those moments jarring and silly to me. Finally, at the end, when MacDuff is about to kill Macbeth, they FLASH bright white lights to slightly (but not totally) blind the audience as to what’s about to happen.

... then all the characters, dead and alive, sit by the wall, nursing their wounds while the last bit of the play happens. The Weird Sisters pass around bowls of soup, and they all eat while one of them sings a modern song that I don’t know well enough to understand why it connects to the scene. I know what this moment was GOING FOR, but it honestly felt like MacDuff stopped murdering Macbeth at the last minute and went “.... You know, violence isn’t going to solve anything. We all made mistakes. Let’s just call it off, apologize, and eat soup.”

There was one side character who, during the performance I saw, spoke into a handheld mic for no reason (with popping P audio to boot, which annoyed me), dressed in a Steve Jobs turtleneck, and spoke with a tone of voice that just seemed flippant and not totally immersed in the drama. I can’t even relate to being confused by this character to other coworkers who saw the show, since they remember a totally different actor (apparently one of them used a wheelchair), or at least a portrayal who didn’t use a handheld mic.

That leads into another aspect of the show that doesn’t help my rating: not only does it have a limited engagement, it was technically still in previews when I saw it, so it was always changing. However, every time I heard of the changes, they never really seemed to be for the better. The core flaws always remain.

Daniel Craig’s performance was OK. He’s a good actor, and he wasn’t bad in the role. However, he also wasn’t great. I’ve seen more engaging Macbeths. I put this down to direction, though. The same could be said for Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth, although I believe her performance was a little stronger.

Finally: points off for causing undue stress on me and my coworkers, who had to avoid saying the name of the show while we were working in different theaters. Bad luck did legit happen after people said it. Also, both times I worked at this theater, it rained and made my job harder.

Now for a couple moments of positivity: I thought the porter scene was super funny and that the actor did it well. Props for that!

Also, since I had to stand in the balcony, I did not see that what I thought was the back wall of theater (a brick wall with piping) was actually the set itself. This meant that when, at the end of the show, the wall MOVED FORWARD, limiting Macbeth’s space, forcing him into conflict, and making him feel that there’s nowhere to run from MacDuff seeking his revenge, I was LEGIT SCARED. THE WALL WAS MOVING, WALLS SHOULDN’T MOVE, WTF

Anyway. Next show!

The Phantom of the Opera

Ah, Phantom. Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. Not gonna lie, you’re so low down partly because your theater is hell to work at. So many tourists, and so many of them angry.

But this show is also farther down partly because the specific performance I saw felt off. I saw this show during the period where so many Broadway actors were coming down with COVID that they had to rely on all the understudies at their disposal. As a result, nearly the entire cast were understudies, and I think it showed. The show felt a little bit offbeat, especially in regards to the Phantom himself. His performance felt more silly than dramatic in some parts, although the show itself doesn’t help in that regard. Christine was good acting wise, but her voice just wasn’t strong enough during a few numbers. Eric also could’ve used a singing boost. It’s not a good sign when your performance of Phantom needs stronger singing.

I want to make one thing clear: I LIKE Phantom of the Opera. (i’m so sorry, best friend who hates it) I don’t love it, but I do like it. I think the music is good, and I find the dramatic shenanigans to be NUTS, yet entertaining. Maybe that’s why this performance felt off to me. I’ve seen a version of the show that I like better in the past, and have my own thoughts on how the show should  be done. The performance I attended just didn’t satisfy that itch. Maybe later non-understudy performances were better! Who can say.

Still. It was Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic theater. The sets and effects were still amazing, and the acting was still good. It was a net positive overall, but it could’ve been better.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Ah, now we TRULY get to the proof that this list isn’t so much “worst to best” as “least fun to most fun.” I honestly wish this show wasn’t so far down the list, as I really did like it. It’s a great adaptation of the book, with great actors, sets, and direction. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie To Kill A Mockingbird, you know what this is about, and you know what happens in it. But it’s still a good story, and it makes for a good show. I remember that for being a Mockingbird adaptation, and dealing with some pretty heavy stuff, this show managed to still have a lot of humor in it. I laughed a surprising amount during the show, but fortunately, it still knew when to keep things serious and solemn.

The show DID add a few new elements. While the play utilized Scout’s recollection of the past as the main narrative force, there were a couple scenes that Scout couldn’t have witnessed, such as Atticus Finch convincing Tom Robinson to let  Atticus be his lawyer for the case. This is a cool moment to see, as this is Atticus and Tom Robinson’s first interaction with each other. However, it’s interesting that Atticus learns that Tom felt sorry for Mayella beforehand, and warns him not to say that in court. It feels like they wanted it to be foreshadowing, or at least a setup so that when Tom says it later, the audience KNOWS that the trial is essentially lost, or that Tom really felt pressured into telling the absolute truth of the matter. However, since we didn’t get (or NEED) that kind of setup in the book or the movie, it feels a little extraneous. Still, it wasn’t bad at all, so I’m fine with its presence in the show.

Jeff Daniels was great as Atticus Finch. As someone who mainly knew him from Dumb and Dumber, a film that I don’t really find entertaining, I was pleasantly surprised to see him excellently play this intelligent, (mostly) soft-spoken, and principled man. When he put Bob Ewell in a headlock, despite having to stand the whole time, I was so pumped that I stood on my tiptoes to watch.

The other actors also do their roles justice. They cast young-looking adults as the kids, no child actors here, and they were great at embodying the characters. All three “kids” actually have their own moments of “narrating” and recounting the events of the story.

The actor who plays the man who pretends to be a drunk (a review of the show says that Sorkin combined three characters into one for his play: Link Deas, Reverend Sykes, and Dolphus Raymond) was not only the same actor for Boo Radley, but he was also the one deaf actor in the show. This worked very well. Not only is the “drunk” man an outcast for being deaf AS WELL AS for having had a mixed kid with a black woman, but also Boo has another dimension to him for his own silence and outcast status. Scout even signs “thank you” to him shortly before the very end of the play.

Also. I gotta give props to this play for making Scout’s big old ham costume. I was waiting for that and it delivered. Bravo.

Despite not being closer to the top, this show was still great, and I’ll fondly remember watching it. (although I won’t fondly remember how an usher pressured me to sit in a seat that someone had already bought a ticket for, how I tripped and fell flat on my face getting back out, and how another usher SHUSHED me after SHE ASKED ME to explain what had happened)

Chicago

Ah, now we’re getting to the fun stuff! I went into this pretty much blind and had a great time. I honestly don’t have much criticism. It was just real good. I think the cast was mostly comprised of understudies, since I saw it during the period where so many Broadway actors were coming down with COVID that they had to rely on all the understudies at their disposal, but if so, they did an excellent job. The singing and choreography were phenomenal, the content was FUN, and I had a good time.

Also, I love that both the male and female chorus members wore sexy outfits.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

If there’s any show I’m glad my job let me watch for free, it’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This way, I didn’t give J.K. Rowling my money, and I supported the people I DO care about: Broadway actors.

While it’s true that the show’s script wasn’t personally penned by Rowling, she DID essentially give it her blessing. She was present when the writers formed the story, and even answered questions that they had. There’s no uncertainty that she at least contributed to this, so I still consider this partially her responsibility.

This show is most convoluted thing I’ve ever seen in my goddamned life.

This definitely isn’t helped by the fact that this is the TRIMMED version. At least for NYC, they changed the show from two separate two-and-a-half hour performances to one three-and-a-half hour performance. As a result, it feels like the “Summer Once Again” episode of The Goes Wrong Show... in reverse. Before intermission, the show runs at a breakneck pace, with little room to breathe, let alone establish ANYTHING. It’s only after intermission that things finally run at a human speed again. Or maybe I was just used to it. Either way, it took over an hour for things to feel normal.

The plot’s still a MESS. The protagonists’/antagonists’ kids angle can’t help but make it feel like a direct-to-DVD Disney sequel, or a child OC fanfic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I never really got into Albus (unsure why. I think it felt like he was just complaining after a while), while I unexpectedly grew more on Scorpius as the show went on. He was a bit annoying to me at first, but then he just became sweet and fun. I wish him the best.

The Voldemort’s daughter thing is, of course, ridiculous. And with how little the character is “set up” (she’s hiding as someone else for a while), it just kinda feels like she came out of nowhere. This show’s biggest fault is that it’s trying to tell a Harry Potter years-long story in one Broadway show. There’s just too much to cram into one viewing, or maybe even two. I’m not saying the answer is to make one show for each school year, though. That would make no sense. I also don’t think you NEED to limit the story to just one school year, although that would make things simpler. I think, overall, it needs to be presented in a more concise and better paced way. Preferably after scrapping the time travel plot, or at least making the time travel more like how it occurred in Prisoner of Azkaban.

SPEAKING OF WHICH. I don’t like how this show utterly throws out how the Time Turner is set up in Prisoner of Azkaban. Despite technically creating paradoxes, I like how the Time Turner is used in that book/movie. It establishes that while you can use it to mess about in time and do the right thing, there’s still a degree of certainty to the true timeline. All the things that the characters try to fix end up resulting in what they already experienced. This creates a few bootstrap paradoxes, but it shows that while their actions are useful, they can’t really CHANGE anything. This made the timeline feel secure, and prevented the time travel from being too powerful. I always respected that about the Time Turner, even when I was younger and loved the idea of changing the past to affect the future.

.... and then they go in a totally different direction for Cursed Child. It turns out that you CAN change the past, and that you CAN create a totally different future, and that if you do the wrong thing, whoopsie! Now Hogwarts is run by Headmaster Umbridge, is guarded by Dementors, and you’re late to celebrating Voldemort Day.

Yes, all that happens in one of the alternate futures of this show. Yes, I did actually laugh at the reveal.

So. After all the faults I just listed (and more I didn’t list), why is this show here on my list? How did it beat Phantom, Mockingbird, and even Chicago?

Partly, this is due to the effects. Whenever I asked someone how Cursed Child was, they replied with “Oh, the effects are GREAT!” Which... may not have been a good sign for the story, but it turned out to be absolutely true. The effects are, indeed, astounding. The crew took the challenge of representing magic on a Broadway stage and answered it phenomenally. There were moments that took my breath away in how real they looked, especially in regards to the Dementors.

Another reason this show is here on the lists is.... well, I had a fun time.

I DID have a fun time in a way the show didn’t intend, though. Now that I care less about the Harry Potter series overall, I was able to laugh at this show a lot more than I would have as a kid . It was definitely FUN to see how this story is a convoluted mess. Also, the acting is still good, so there were still good performances.

Also, there were some parts of the show that successfully hit the little parts of the Harry Potter fan that still reside in me, or at least the Potter fan of the past. The Dementors made me feel like a scared kid again. Seeing magic and hearing the familiar spells thrilled me. I feel like if I was a stronger fan, I’d dislike how some characters were done dirty. But I’d also like an excuse to see other characters return and give one last hurrah.

Finally. One shout-out to the moment that legit felt like it could have been from a Potter book or movie. While most of the show felt like new Rowling stuff, stuff that’s weak or weird or just extraneous, there was ONE moment that wowed me in effects, execution, and nostalgia:

The trolley lady.

There’s a moment in the show where Albus and Scorpius climb on the roof of the Hogwarts Express to leap off before they reach school. However, as they do, the trolley lady suddenly appears, perfectly balanced, even her trolley full of snacks.

Then she reveals herself to be an eternal aspect of the train who helps to ensure that every student REMAINS on the train. She even says the Marauders couldn’t escape her. She turns into a monster, her fingertips ELONGATING before our very eyes into claws, as she roars at the two boys escaping.

That was NUTS. My heart was pounding in my chest, and for the first time in years, I felt like a true Potter fan experiencing more genuine Harry Potter.

Still, I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. And I’ll continue my boycott of anything J.K. Rowling. I haven’t seen the new Fantastic Beasts, nor do I intend to. PLEASE don’t give any money to Rowling, as she’s done so much harm to the trans community.

But credit where credit is due. I did enjoy this Broadway experience, even as I scratched my head at it. If you have an opportunity to see it for free (no money to J.K. involved), then take it.

The Little Prince

Ahh, now onto another head scratcher! This show delves into the artsy abstract, with lots of dancing, maneuvering on aerial straps, and projected animated landscapes. While there IS a narrator onstage recounting the story, they do not physically resemble the Aviator, and they also speak aloud the “dialogue” that the other characters would be saying.

It didn’t help that I went into the show totally blind, not knowing what it would be like. I hadn’t even read the BOOK before. For most of the show, my reaction was that one Krusty GIF:

However. This show grew on me, and eventually won me over. It might look overly artsy at first, but it really is beautiful. The music and choreography are just gorgeous. Every part was fascinating, even if I didn’t know what was going on. I was confused, but also intrigued, thoughtful, and entertained; these emotional states lasted all the way until the end, when they showered us in red paper petals shaped like hearts.

Also, there was a part after the bows where someone went on the aerial straps and actually swung OVER the crowd like Spiderman. That was cool. :3

Now that I’ve read the book, the show makes a lot more sense, and I appreciate it as an adaptation in retrospect. Even if the vain main was adapted into a clown-looking dude who uses a smartphone. I truly wish I could see this again with my newfound knowledge of the book in mind.

Plaza Suite

Now onto the rich person play! This is what I and a few other coworkers called it because 1) it’s at a very fancy looking theater and 2) the crowds that came to see it were typically (but not always) rich New Yorkers and tourists. Half of them acted SO privileged, and the Mask Up folks were even told to be more lenient with them. While we still had to tell them to keep their masks up, we were also advised to not be as “forceful” or “commanding” as we would be at other theaters, which left a sour taste in my mouth every time I heard it.

However, the show itself is great, and definitely gets better the more it goes on. Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker act very well in it, and they understandably have incredible chemistry together. Broderick especially surprised me with the amount of physical comedy that he does in the second and third parts of the play. He’s a bit of a hit or miss actor in most of the things I’ve seen him in, but this play is a hit. Plaza Suite is also just a very clever play overall, with the humor only getting better with each part, so the actors have wonderful material to work with.

Also, the play takes advantage of the fact that there are no set changes. The set looks AMAZING. It looks just like a fancy expensive plaza suite was chopped out of a building and plopped onto the stage. The special effects (the few times they were necessary) were also great! When the rainstorm happened outside the windows in the third part, it looked and sounded pretty real!

Overall, despite attracting grumpy privileged rich people, it was a fun time!

A Strange Loop

Ohhhh, talk about FUN. Almost all of my coworkers were scrambling to get their hands on a shift for this show. I came in mostly blind, but I knew a few important things: 1) It’s the tenth musical to win the Pulitzer Prize, 2) it's the first musical to win a Pulitzer written by a black person to win, 3) it’s the first musical to win a Pulitzer without first having a Broadway run, and 4) it’s unabashedly black and queer.

Not only was I able to watch the show after my only shift there, but I was  also extremely lucky to get a ticket in the third row of the orchestra. (Someone just gave the ticket back to the theater; I guess they had to cancel? Unsure) Anyway, I had a CLEAR view of this wild, meta, and heart wrenching show. Everybody in the cast is so talented, and I was surprised to learn this is Jaquel Spivey’s Broadway debut. He plays Usher, the lead, and he does it wonderfully.

Honestly, there’s not much else I have to say here. The music is great, the acting’s phenomenal, the emotions are powerful, and the bare cheeks of the chorus member who stood on my side of the stage during “Exile in Gayville” are tight.

Also, the crowd for this show was definitely the most understanding and mask-wearing crowd I had ever worked with. Loved that.

Company

This was a blast. Company was another show I went into mostly blind, and I’m glad I did for this production. In fact, I’m curious about the effects of going into this one blind, as this production of Company has some big gender swaps. The male lead Bobby is now a woman (Bobbie), the bride-to-be with cold feet Amy is now an anxious gay groom named Jamie, and the three girls that Bobby dates are now three men. The only time the genderswap feels noticeable is a moment late in the play where Patti Lupone’s character proposes that Bobbie should sleep with her husband. In the original, she proposes that she should sleep with Bobby. I think the original works better tonally. Aside from that, everything else felt so natural that, if you hadn’t told me there was a genderswap at all, I don’t think I would’ve guessed.

Genderswap or not, this was a great time. I’m usually not the biggest fan of abstract staging; it’s gotta be done well for me to really be on board. This production does it super well! From the big neon letters, to hiding the number 35 in various places, to changing prop sizes, all the ways the staging plays with Bobbie’s psyche are both entertaining and thought provoking.

Since I came into Company blind, I was legit surprised by the power of the show’s comedy. Company could have achieved a high place on this list through laugh-power alone.

The acting and singing are, of course, amazing, and I’m so glad I got to see Patti Lupone in a Broadway show. She may not have too major a role, but she performs it so well. She just has a dazzling presence to her, and a beautiful voice to boot.

The rest of the cast are great too! My favorite number was Jamie’s “I Am Not Getting Married Today.” His performance was wildly entertaining, as was the random priest popping out of the fridge and freaking him out. Comedy gold.

Come From Away

I’m surprised that I was able to watch this show totally blind. I didn’t know a THING about it until a couple of days before my first shift there. The one thing I learned before I saw it?

“It’s about 9/11.″

That definitely gave me the wrong idea of what this show would be like. I came into it expecting a consistently dark, somber, and mournful story. However, while it does center around a tragic event, and it touches on some of the paranoia, stress, and xenophobia that people felt during/after 9/11, the show surprised me with lots of fun music, warmth, and goodwill. It even taught me about part of the aftermath of 9/11 that I never knew about- that after US airspace was closed, 38 international aircraft were forced to reroute and land in Gander, Newfoundland. Luckily, the town of Gander welcomed the hundreds of new people, provided them with food and shelter over the next week, and stayed in touch with their new friends in the years afterward. It’s such an interesting and heartwarming story, and as I watched from standing room, I was bouncing to the tune of the music all the way through.

(Also, thank you for being under 2 hours. It’s nice to watch a Broadway show that’s the length of a movie.)

The Music Man

Now for the show that so many people are dying to see and willing to spend hundreds of dollars on tickets for- The Music Man, starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. While I knew the basic story of The Music Man beforehand, I still hadn’t actually watched it before, so I had a fun time watching this partially blind. The story’s silly, and parts are clearly old fashioned, but I thought it was very entertaining. The music is great, and it was nice to hear an official (yet slightly changed for modern audiences) version of “Shipoopi” after being so familiar with the Family Guy rendition.

The two aspects that really blew me away, though, were the look of the show and the acting.

This show was fun just to watch. The sets and costumes are all gorgeous. Also, during “The Wells Fargo Wagon”, they did a couple of neat things with the horse-drawn wagon. First, they had little moving cutouts of the horse galloping with the wagon in tow in the “distance”, which was fun. Then they had the “horse” (people in a really great horse costume) come out on stage, which was so impressive.

And as for the acting? It’s Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, of COURSE it was amazing. This was actually my first real experience seeing Hugh Jackman sing and dance, and he’s excellent at both. The rest of the cast is great too; everyone was full of energy and immensely talented.

This show might’ve given me a couple tough crowds to work with, but being able to watch it was worth it.

Hangmen

I couldn’t help but love Hangmen. I loved it so much that it was the only show I saw twice during my old Broadway job. Sadly, both times, I had to miss the first ten minutes, in which (as far as I could piece together) the main character condemns to death the man who sets the whole plot in motion. I went into the show mostly blind, knowing only that it took place in the 1960s, after hanging is abolished in the UK, and that it was written by Martin McDonagh. (He created The Pillowman)

This play is a great dark comedy. Despite the dark subject matter and the attitudes of some of the characters, nearly every joke landed. Even if the laughs were sometimes surprised or slightly uncomfortable, the jokes WORKED. There’s so much great setup and payoff, and I was always invested in what was going on.

The sets are also wonderful. While I couldn’t really appreciate the first set (jail room), I loved looking at the detail of the later pub set. Like the plaza suite in Plaza Suite, it truly looked like they carved out a real location (in this case, a 60s British pub) and put in on a Broadway stage. Also, there’s a short scene in a cafe that was stage marvelously, literally taking place ABOVE the pub set. It was practically hidden up there, only revealed when it had to be, and it still looked realistic, with a THUNDERSTORM visibly happening outside its windows. So cool.

Alfie Allen of Game of Thrones fame is in this production, and he’s marvelous. Even before I knew he was in Game of Thrones (I did not watch it), I thought he was one of the strongest actors in Hangmen. He just has this ENERGY of great acting ability on that stage. Then I learned what he’s been in, and I thought “Oh, that makes sense.”

Without going into spoilers, I will say that the hanging in Hangmen (that I did see, at least) is chilling to watch. I had to keep telling myself that there had to be a harness, that there were precautions in place, that they wouldn’t risk the life of an actor. Great acting combined with great effects equal legit fear that someone’s gonna die.

Finally, I really liked the excuse to listen to Northern accents for a couple hours. It’s just nice. Reminded me of when I was studying in Manchester, even though Hangmen takes place in Lancashire. Speaking of which, I was super amused to hear the hometown of one of my friends, Burnley, get name-dropped a half-dozen times over the course of the show. I don’t hear about it much outside of him and football, so that was a nice surprise.

And that concludes my thoughts of all the Broadway shows I saw during my old job. I did get a NEW job working on Broadway, but it won’t provide the same show-watching opportunities that the old one did. (Fortunately, people will be WAY more polite to me because I’m not working COVID safety anymore) Still, I’ll always be grateful for this period in which I saw what is probably nearly a thousand dollars worth of Broadway shows.

Thanks for sticking around to read all this! If you’ve seen these shows, lemme know your thoughts. :3

#Broadway #This is me #on the job #Hangmen #The Music Man #Come From Away #Company #A Strange Loop #Plaza Suite #The Little Prince #Chicago #To Kill A Mockingbird #The Phantom of the Opera #Macbeth

[lesbiancolumbo]

Alfred Hitchcock

The critical dogfights over Hitchcock’s status were fought at a crucial time, in the early 1960s, to assert the value of his greatest works—Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. And these films are without equal for the way they adjust the cinematic image to our expectations. They are deeply expressive of the way we watch and respond to stories. Their greatness is often employed to explain the nature and workings of cinema. Thus Hitchcock became a way of defining film, a man exclusively intent on the moving image and the compulsive emotions of the spectator. Hitchcock in England is a career unto itself, no matter that the American films take on a greater power and ease—like driving a Cadillac after a Morris Minor. The English films are playful, and sometimes facetious or silly. But they have dark moments and there are stirrings of sexual menace. The comic adventure of The Lady Vanishes, for instance, turns into a parable on appeasement, in which stock English fools get hurt. The first Man Who Knew Too Much is startlingly grim and cruel, and Sabotage is not unworthy of Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. But it was Hitch’s storytelling flair—and visual storytelling—that got him to America, where his new boss, Selznick, saw the need to teach that Brit plausibility and character. Selznick was a pompous teacher, but he had a point. And the sardonic Hitchcock did study in those first years. Thus, immediately, Rebecca moves us.

The first point to make about Hitchcock, therefore, is the variability of his work. That is the more important in that Hitchcock’s defenders frequently praise his technical and commercial knowingness. But no matter how many times the profit ratio of Psycho is repeated, it does not alter the fact that Hitchcock made several flops, several films in which the entire narrative structure—over which he spent such time and care—is grotesquely miscalculated. Stage Fright, The Trouble with Harry, Lifeboat, and Torn Curtain seem to me thumpingly bad films, helpless in the face of intransigent plots, true delicacy of humor, and uncooperative players. Spellbound, The Paradine Case, and Rope are flawed by unwieldy or wrongheaded situations. Dial M for Murder is unadventurous suspense, Saboteur a monotonous chase film. The rich emotional undertones of North by Northwest show how simple many of the other thrillers are. Furthermore, those defects often affect much better films. Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock’s most fascinating films, but Farley Granger and Ruth Roman are coldly abandoned by their director. Even Psycho, made with a torturemaster’s refinement, stumbles over the implausibility of the car-purchase scene. And while it is legitimate to defend and praise his use of back projection as proof of the preference for emotional to actual reality, it is equally clear that so celebrated a technician ought to be able to achieve such inner realism without jolting the audience from its identification with the film.

To see Hitchcock’s films, in my opinion, is not to confront an author of supreme technical and narrative confidence, or a moral philosopher of great wisdom. I believe him when he said he was nervous about whether Psycho would prosper. After all, he swapped endings on Topaz, allowed bizarre passages of inconsequential chatter in Frenzy, and watched stonily over drab performances from Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in Torn Curtain. And all this in the years when virtually every quarter of the film world was prepared to acknowledge the significance of his work. One might argue that age was catching him up, except that Frenzy is almost a parody Hitchcock film, packed with moments that spring from his best work, which are persistently ruined by the uneasy jokiness of the film and by its ignorance of the real world.

Ignorance and fear are the abiding impressions left by his films. Just as his suspense works through deliberately withheld knowledge—and withheld from the hypersensitive voyeurist curiosity that he has aroused—so he teaches us to share the fear of the world that he always owned up to. Why not face the implications of his two celebrated admissions: that he feared, above all, arrest; and that his aim in cinema was to put the audience through it? I would not deny that his films can lead to great insights of an intensely pessimistic vision. But I do not see how a man so fearful, and so chronically adept at conveying fear, can be judged as a profound artist. Suffering in his films invariably depends upon the victim’s being unbalanced or demented. The pain felt by Perkins in Psycho or Stewart in Vertigo is savage, yet it is more limited than that in Renoir, Mizoguchi, or Welles because of Hitchcock’s resort to mania and melodrama.

“Hitchcock’s most profound subject and achievement is the juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and criminal outrage. The crisscross motif, derived from thriller fiction, is itself a map of the way audiences willingly cross over from their seats to involve themselves in a film. James Stewart being drawn into Kim Novak in Vertigo is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of Rear Window—a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives—is the principle of cinematic spectacle. Hitchcock’s best films all grow out of his instinctive employment of our impulses and fantasy life in the cinema. And his moral seriousness consists of showing us the violent, psychotic fruits of some of those impulses and shyly asking us to claim them as our own. I say “shyly” because Hitchcock did not properly own up to his seriousness. It is not enough to paint Hitchcock the interviewee as a sly legpuller who teased earnest questions. The truth may be that he did not fully grasp his own films. Truffaut’s book amply reveals a man of very mundane, shallow moral and social attitudes, flip rather than witty, genuinely more interested in technique than in meaning. And, it must be said, there is a degree of spiritual coarseness and callousness in Hitchcock’s work that chimes with the career-long taste for brutalizing our nerves.

#asks #thomson meme

[lswardonline]

Babble #1

I was moving Left, Right? Or were you moving right as I Ieft? Indeed you guess that truly I jest, but I'll be Goddamned if I don't see you God blessed, bathed in beauty a gift near in greatness equal to the habit of breathing; I'm not into believing what I am not seeing, so I am seeking, you sweet  sight for sore eyes. The more you, the more I don't know, meant by that. It was like days passing and messages missed, but we meant to chat. That's c.p.t. not g.p.t. lost in you thoughts of you frequent me frequently, but urgency does not always equate to a frequency to conceive is to plant a seed, but yet and still no one owns the tree so I'm 0 for 3. The math is I'm no longer at bat kid, but here is look at you ****, this dream is lucid, but waking life is ruthless and gives no **** Ruth is. 

© Lansey Spenster Waverly Ward

[somethingvinyl]

The lawsuit is over, the ugly covers have all been released—1979 is the year we unkink the hose and all that great music Zappa was working on in ’77 and ’78 comes out. And it does so on his own new label, Zappa Records, distributed by Phonogram but with far more sole administrative control than FZ’s previous record labels. This is the beginning of a truly independent Zappa.

I have such mixed feelings about Sheik Yerbouti. It's unquestionably one of FZ's best albums, and even pretty high on my list of favorite albums of all time. But the lyrics… they are not good. This album completes Zappa's slide from lyrics that are provocative and transgressive to ones that are offensive for the sake of causing offense. His lyrics never get back into the zone of good taste; he stays here for the rest of his career. The intent is the same as it ever was—shock value humor with a dash of asking listeners to question the mores of society. But when you try to be an equal opportunity offender, to be "fair" by offending everybody, you're really missing some social and moral cues. Those in power are not harmed by your offense to the degree that others will be, so your offense is far from equal. And, of course, if you’re going to go for offensive humor, you’ve got to be FUNNY, and Zappa only hits on like 50% of the swings he takes—some of what he sings actually is funny, but so much of it just comes off as mean. And it isn’t just that it didn’t age well (though it didn’t). It had mostly the same negative impact at the time of release.

In any case, the lyrics here range from fun (Baby Snakes, City of Tiny Lites, Dancin' Fool) to despicable (Jewish Princess, Broken Hearts Are for Assholes) with no warning. Probably the most significant song from this album is also its best case study: Bobby Brown Goes Down. The intent is obviously to mock its narrator, a misogynist macho-man rapist, and the first verse does a pretty good (if tasteless) job of doing so. But in taking him down in the next few verses, Zappa mocks women's liberation and the LGBT community, with a tangle of confusion about what it means to be gay, transgender, and kinky—all concepts that Frank showed a lot of interest toward as subcultures similar to his own freak scene of the ‘60s, but doesn’t seem to have taken the time to truly understand. And the worst thing is that the music on Bobby Brown is stellar. The melody is great and works with the lyrics to make the punchlines hit so well, even when they miss the mark for me. It’s no wonder this song was a massive hit across eastern Europe, where they have an ear for great music and the language barrier prevents the lyrics from making their full impact.

Most (all?) of the guitar solos on this album use a technique Zappa called xenochrony (Greek roots: “foreign time”). He had been recording every live show he played for a while, and indeed all the basic tracks for the songs on this album were pulled from live shows (and massively overdubbed). For his guitar solos, he would pull a solo he played for an entirely different song and slap it over the backing track for the new one, finding ones that would interact in new and unexpected ways. It’s prominent on Yo’ Mama, and on Rat Tomago, Rubber Shirt, and Sheik Yerbouti Tango, the last three of which are entirely xenochronous, built from backing instruments that have also been removed from different songs and combined with guitar solos from others. It’s clever and the results here are very cool. He will overuse the technique later, causing a lot of his songs from the ‘80s to sound rather interchangeable, like they’re built out of lego. But for this album, his “Ampex guitar” (as he later called it) is great fun.

The band here is top-notch—Terry Bozzio on drums and frequent screamy vocals, Patrick O’Hearn with his bwompy fretless bass, Ed Mann on marimbas (finally filling the hole Ruth left), the legendary Adrian Belew on guitar (Bowie headhunted him out of Zappa’s band on this tour, beginning Belew’s ascent into guitar stardom). I really can’t overemphasize how, despite how much I hate some of these lyrics, I LOVE this album. It’s the curse of being a Zappa fan… I will not defend him, but nor will I stop listening obsessively.

#frank zappa #vinyl

[nataliesnews]

Fwd: my leg, beetroot,a conference about ultras spitting at Christians, a main street closed to women  17/6/2023

0

Fwd: my leg, beetroot,a conference about ultras spitting at Christians, a main street closed to women

Inbox

Natalie Ginsburg <[email protected]>

7:23 AM (0 minutes ago)

to Regina, carmel, Ellie, Karen, me, nancy, Emma, Monica, Irving, Ruth, Stephanie, Phylly, Nadav, Ronnie, Eve, Jan

I have decided to try to have inner soles made again. I have less control over my foot and it is reflecting on my balance. I went to Li-El who years ago was the only othorped who agree to make them for me as my foot is so contorted and it really helped for many years but then my feet started to burn underneath and I stopped using them. But this time I went back to her and she said that there are new methods now. It is very expensive and she no longer has contact with the clinic so I will not get any return from them. But after watching me walk she said and this really gave me confidence in her that she can see that I walk well but that I have trouble standing which is true. Also there is a shoe which she would like me to try and it should improve my balance so we will see. I am very careful with the zomba, especially when turning around. I had to laugh at one of my friends who said to me that she can feel she is growing old because she has such trouble putting on her socks which is exactly what I have been experiencing.

Having had a very quiet birthday, I now have three invitations to go out and celebrate in the coming week.

This may interest some of you veggies. At Yaakov last night he made this with beetroot and three different kinds of cheeses. He is quite amazing the way he comes up with his own ideas.

I am so enjoying the informal classes at Davied Yellin. This time we were with a young man who spoke an excellent Arabic. I was surprised as his mother who had come the previous week knew very little. I thought  maybe from the army but it turned out that he is from an Iraqi family and spoke Arabic to his grandmother. We were with two young Palestinian women and found plenty to talk about.....and

I noticed that of all the tables the loudest and more frequent laughter came from hours.  But we have been asked not to bring politics in. So we do not. I hate the summer but in this case it works out well as we meet in the late afternoon and can sit outside so there is space and one group does not bother the other. In winter it is going to be more difficult especially as my hearing is not what it once was.

I was also asked to speak about Machsomwatch to a group of about 10 people at Beit Hakerem. There was  one man there who was an absolute pain in the neck. Do you know the  people who go to a lecture and say they have a question and then give a lecture all on their own. And think that they know better than anyone else? I was speaking about Hawarra where there had been a pogrom and he started contradicting me. I asked him if he had ever been there and very proudly he said that of course he had....at least 4 or 5 times. So I said well I have been going there since 2000 and that I had been there the day after the pogrom and seen the burnt houses. He proudly said that  two of the Israelis had been arrested and when I said that there had been 10s of settlers there attacking and burning he again went off on a tangent. I was also rather annoyed at the woman who had asked me to come as no attempt was made to stop him from interrupting me and allow me to speak. Afterwards she asked me if I would like to join their group as they meet weekly.  To which I replied that there was no way I would come while he was around. ...

I had been supposed to go to a conference about the attitude of extreme religious towards Christians. There were so many people wanting to take part that those of us who understand Hebrew were asked to watch by zoom which I hate. In this case even more as it is for the whole day. To sit alone in a room for hours watching a screen is not my idea of taking part in a conference. I am listening to it now and it is so frustrating. Also to see the videos which are put on. Yischa Harani is a wonderful woman who works for the relations between Jews and Christians. It was supposed to be in Migdal Davied but as you can see by the PDF  the extreme Jerusalem municipality threatened to dismiss the director if he allowed the conference which was then moved. Yischa described how religious Jews spit as they go past Christian churches, how they spit at the monks and the nuns and sometimes attack them physically, sometimes spray pepper gas at them,  desecrate graveyards, break crosses, throw rubbish and worse at the monks and nuns. Even soldiers of the Givati battalion were shown doing so in the act. Very rarely are any of the perpetrators arrested and even then are often freed under various pretexts.

How does one feel when a child of two and a half is killed by a sniper and a brief report is made of this while the death of two soldiers is reported and discussed over more than a week. How does one feel when a 80 year old man is handcuffed, blindfolded and gagged by soldiers and then left to die. They are not brought to justice. The soldiers thought he was sleeping when they left.....they thought he was under the influence of drugs.....the army is even incapable of giving a coherent explanation. This by the soldiers of a battalion who time after time are reported to be carrying out such acts. Soldiers in the  Netzah Yehuda Battalion, which until December 2022

only operated in the West Bank,

have been at the center of several

controversies

connected to

right-wing extremism

and

violence

against

Palestinians

PDF at the bottom

Now how does this strike  you?  Women are told not to use the main road of Bnei Brak when it is crowded or on Shabbat or high holidays.  In the cities in which you live can you imagine this happening? And the law allows this? This is Israel today.

And this is terrifying.....I could easily see people disappearing quietly as they did in South Africa.  I can see how this would be  used against the leaders of the demonstrations.

This is from Ha'aretz....a newspaper on the left.  "According to the proposal, Ben Gvir would be able to approve renewable administrative detentions for up to six months for anyone the minister thinks poses a danger to the public, if the move is requested by the police commissioner and with the approval of the attorney general, the state attorney or one of their deputies.

Aside from the expanded powers to jail citizens, the bill grants the minister power to act alone, under certain circumstances, in ordering restrictions on where a person can live or visit, limit who they can speak to, forbid them from using the internet, and place curbs on what they can purchase or what services they are allowed to receive or actions they are allowed to perform.  

State attorney: Ben Gvir’s administrative detention bill a threat to democracy

Legal officials urge Justice Minister Yariv Levin to shoot down legislation, which would give national security minister power to okay holding suspects without trial

https://www.timesofisrael.com/state-attorney-ben-gvirs-administrative-detention-bill-a-threat-to-democracy/

So today I am off to hold a picnic .I just hope it cools down as already at 7am it is boiling hot. I also have it earlier this afternoon as I want to get to the weekly demo.

#Fwd: my leg beetroota conference about ultras spitting at Christians a main street closed to women 17/6/2023

[endfght]

🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 

david & matilyn hayes: *jigsaw vo* matilyn,, you were given not only a second, but a third chance at life, and you've been throwing it away. maybe theyre in a trap together?? bc david wasted his first chance or something,,, maybe they run into one another when being questioned by the police???? or maybe they're in some counseling group together?? IDK!! but i think that they could be Neat or if we don't want to traumatize mat even more (or figure out what kind of trap to put her in fghjkl), david can still just be an orderly at a hospital, maybe one that she sees frequently when she goes for checkups n shit.

blythe johnson & taylor madison: i'm thinkin... blythe is in some religious doomsday cult in the midwest that taylor/charlie/lee come across maybe on their way to alaska? blythe is among the Least Crazy of everyone there and lowkey probably wants to leave with them but doesn't/can't. maybe when taylor decides to leave alaska she can go back there?? and maybe by that point blythe's gotten out and found a more Normal community to call home that she can join? she might ramble about god and saviors and shit but taylor is more than welcome to tell her to Shut the Hell up. lee's health taking a dip when they get to blythe's community... taylor finding her praying for him... and probably Blowing up at her >>>

ruth langmore & bradley martin: ok. hear me out. bradley leaves white pine bay and finds her way to the ozarks. maybe she also works at the blue cat or lazy-o. she can get roped into the money laundering bullshit with ruth and marty. imagine bradley comforting ruth after she was literally waterboarded<3 they can bond over their dead dads, too!! i just think that their sarcasm would go really well together and they could be best friends ok

olivia moon & daniella walsh: lowkey one of olivia's (victoria's) scams. maybe dani and brad were looking for a nanny (or weren't necessarily looking but dani and olivia met and she offered to help out) and she fell into their laps. probably originally planned on stealing from them or something but actually ended up getting along rly well w dani. maybe she tells her... the Truth... about who she really is,, about what she's done in her past. olivia gets some closure with talking about it out loud and in return she listens to everything that dani is willing to share and does her best to help work through her own trauma.

+bonus bc ...

isobelle rivera & christine brown: belle absolutely adores luke and christine and their girls, ok???? she never really had friends that she was super close to, and so having this other couple that she and joey can turn to no matter what (and vice versa) is so new and strange to her that she cannot help but to put her everything into it. she reaches out all the time, always tries to make plans to do things together, and can definitely be Too Much. she always offers to watch the girls for christine and luke so that they can have date/quiet nights to themselves. belle comes to view christine as her best friend, someone that she can spill her heart out and trust enough with her daughter alone... (i hope) she knows everything that she and luke have been through both together and on their own and just<3<;3<;3 is so proud of how far all of them have come in life. @hallowburnt.

#matilynxsaw crossover get her OUT of there #w inspo taken from the nate/matilyn thread we just restarted #and john kramers stupid fucked up reasoning<3 #maybe the timelines dont match up even a little bit but rp is fake and FOR FUN so im saying it doesnt matter #ALSO ALSO i dont know if ur keepin mat's childhood c*ncer storyline but thats where the second less traumatizing option comes from dfgjskdf #blythe literally begging taylor to take her with them one night #and then the next morning acting like that Never happened #＆. inbox ‚ answered . #hallowburnt

[warningsine]

In the very first episode of Netflix’s “GLOW,” Ruth (Alison Brie), a struggling actress, auditions for an all-ladies wrestling show directed by Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), a crotchety, crude and jaded filmmaker with a string of low-budget exploitation flicks to his name. Their first one-on-one encounter is humiliating for Ruth, as Sam instantly picks her résumé and head shot apart, wondering aloud if people think she is pretty.

“I’m looking at you one second, I think ‘[Expletive] yeah, she’s hot,'” he snarks. “And then the next second I’m like, ‘I don’t know — is she, really?'”

Thus begins a prickly odd-couple relationship common to workplace comedies: His dismissive curmudgeon clashes with her overachieving go-getter, until eventually, the curmudgeon is softened ever so slightly by the other’s earnestness. But despite its familiarity, the dynamic stood out in Season 1, in large part because Ruth and Sam avoided becoming one of the most tired TV tropes: the will-they-or-won’t they? couple. Unfortunately in the second season, now on Netflix, the “GLOW” writers are suggesting that romance is the only natural course for this pair to take.

Ruth and Sam’s interactions were among the highlights of Season 1 — snappy, rhythmic exchanges that could delight even without dialogue. (When Ruth offers her impression of Audrey Hepburn winning the best actress Oscar, Sam’s bewildered facial expression does most of the talking.) The relationship is also where one of the show’s major themes — sexism in the workplace — plays out most explicitly. Ruth is the first to see the potential for “GLOW” to be more than just a silly wrestling show and frequently chimes in with creative suggestions. She is a bit of a suck up, but Sam’s ongoing piggish insults reveal his internalized misogyny. When he cuts her from an audition in an early scene, he suggests his decision may be because “I don’t like your face, or your ass.”

“I don’t know,” he continues. “Maybe I like both of them too much. I don’t have to explain myself — that’s the beauty of being a director.”

Of course, Ruth’s unfailing determination slowly begins to chip away at Sam’s exterior, particularly when he shows compassion while accompanying her to a doctor for an abortion. But until now, their relationship echoed Lou Grant and Mary Richards or Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon, not Sam and Diane: rare pop culture rapports, between a male boss and female employee, that are comically antagonistic but clearly based in mutual, platonic admiration and affection. It’s easy and a cliché to turn such dynamics into sexual tension, which is why Ruth and Sam felt refreshing for what they seemed to eschew.

But in the otherwise excellent Season 2, the “GLOW” writers opt for the easy and cliché route. In the seventh episode, “Nothing Shattered,” the show begins to hammer home an unspoken romantic connection by pitting Sam against the new character Phil, the cameraman who has vied for Ruth’s affections behind the scenes. After she’s seriously injured in the ring, Sam becomes jealous when Phil carries her offstage; at the hospital, he haughtily steps in to wheel her to her room. “My show,” Sam says. “Capeesh, Hercules?”

In the penultimate episode, “Rosalie,” Ruth accompanies Sam to his daughter’s school dance to help smooth out a family conflict. As the pair takes the dance floor, the song switches from the Human League’s upbeat “Don’t You Want Me” to Madonna’s “Crazy for You.” With the mood effectively set — she’s even leaning on him for support because of her injury — he goes in for a kiss. She ducks away and leaves to seek out Phil, but by the end of the season that romance seems doomed as she leaves with the rest of the cast for their new Las Vegas show, the camera lingering meaningfully on Ruth and Sam sitting together on the bus.

So: Will they or won’t they? Even if they don’t, the show has already diminished one of its biggest strengths — their relationship — by introducing this tired question. And if Ruth and Sam do hook up, it will undercut each character in different ways.

Sam’s slow and imperfect evolution toward being less of a sexist pig would be more powerful if his redemption stood on its own, rather than attached to his attraction to one of the women who is most responsible for it. And while Phil may not turn out to be a good fit for Ruth — who acknowledges that she has often made poor dating choices — a pivot to Sam would suggest a step backward for her character, just when it seemed she was finally entering a new mode of self-awareness.

It also doesn’t help that in real life Maron is nearly 20 years older than Brie, yet another example of Hollywood casting romantic duos in which the woman is significantly younger.

“GLOW” is a deceptively complex show, calling attention to culturally relevant issues, from #MeToo to representations of race and class, while maintaining a dark sense of humor and plenty of heart. Which is why this sudden move into hackneyed territory feels like such a letdown. Part of the pleasure of witnessing the growth of Ruth and Sam’s relationship, especially his begrudging acknowledgment that she has much to contribute to the show, was that it didn’t feel weighted down by the politics of dating. (Although it’s worth noting that in an interview with Indiewire, Brie and Maron said that they saw their characters as romantically involved from the beginning.)

Thankfully, there are a few moments in Season 2 that stick with that spirit. In “Rosalie,” Sam lets Ruth crash on his couch one night. Sam hands her a blanket and pillow, turns off the lights and heads into his room across the hall. It’s a simple exchange, but it demonstrates how far they’ve come as friends and colleagues, even if they don’t always see eye to eye. The moment also stands out because it comes and goes swiftly, with no tension or awkwardness, no lingering glances. That’s what makes it special.

#glow

[ssaalexblake]

Still think it’s weird Asure ended up at the arctic circle. Like, that’s the puzzle piece that is throwing me? How does that make sense??? Swarm says he’s been kept locked up there for millennia basically tied to a pole. That’s not... Great. Like that sucks. But on the flip side, Swarm knows who he is. 

Azure though, Azure is by all intents and purposes free to live happily how she wants in her house, she’s happy with that guy, has no idea he’s actually her jailer. Is in no way tied to a pole. Has no memory of who she is. Who knows how long she’s been there, countless days all the exact same. 

When she said the punishment was imprisonment to the end of the universe and memory erasure, that wasn’t entirely true. It wasn’t And. It was Or. 

It’s fascinating. By outwards appearances only, you’d not say Azure was a prisoner, but her prison was worse really. She was put unwillingly into a prison of another identity, another species, locked away with no idea. So sure, she’s not tied up, but she’s not anymore free. More era frequent criticism on memory wiping. 

It’s also still weird she’s on the arctic circle. Gat doesn’t appear to know of earth, calls it a backwater little planet, and if Gat is one of the team from once, upon time... Kind of odd she doesn’t know what happened to their quarry?? I mean, she doesn’t Have to know what happened but you’d think she would. 

So how did Azure end up on earth??? It’s actually the main factor in me believing Ruth Is between two and three, before one accidentally landed in London the time lords had no care of earth, was not notable, not until the Doctor got all ‘holiday home’ about the planet anyway. How’d she end up there if not because, in some way, of the doctor. 

Like, the only connection is the doctor. Not sure What that connection is, but it’s there. That the doctor and Lee parked themselves on earth to hide as well. That the time lords apparently left Azure there and then dumped 3 on the planet with no escape afterwards (assuming 6b theory is correct, anyway). 

like, there’s a missing piece here. There is Something odd happening. We have enough to know it’s weird but not to know What it is.  

#dw shit #dw spoilers

[carewyncromwell]

[Fantastic Beasts] Julio “Jules” Aquila/Desiree “Desi” Lestrange Playlist

featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Jules @kathrynalicemc and Ruth Negga as Desi @carewyncromwell

x~x~x~x

“The Other Side (cover) ~ pSyrena Studios

“A Million Miles Away” ~ Aladdin (musical)

“The View From Up Here” ~ Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventures

“Just Around the Riverbend/Into the Unknown” ~ Scott and Rycee Jo

“Sky Sailing” ~ Dark Sarah

“A Whole New World (cover)” ~ Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle

“Girls Like You (cover)” ~ Pattycake

“The Right Thing to Do” ~ Carly Simon

“Uptown Girl” ~ Billy Joel

“Elephant Love Medley” ~ Moulin Rouge!

“Found/Tonight” ~ Ben Platt and Lin-Manuel Miranda

x~x~x~x

An orphan with no past and dreams too big for his mind or heart to contain. The daughter of a wealthy Pureblood family whose only worth and focus in life came from the crushing expectations placed on her shoulders. Two stars that indeed never should’ve crossed in orbit -- and yet when the free-spirited sky sailor collided with the uptight, regimented Cursebreaker, they both found that they had infinitely more fun hunting for lost treasures together than they ever had alone. And soon enough, Desiree Lestrange abandoned her previous life of shouldering everyone else’s burdens to set sail alongside Captain Jules Aquila as his right-hand witch and compatriot, frequently providing some much-needed structure and grounding to the flying ship Empyrean and its crew. Whenever real life got overwhelming and Jules started metaphorically floating off into the stratosphere to escape it, Desiree helped bring him back down to earth enough that he could actually work through the issue at hand in a concrete way. Whenever Desiree needed to take a step back and simply enjoy life’s pleasures in the moment, Jules helped her escape the monotony of the day-to-day and take real joy in the amazing world around them. The two were in truth perfect foils for each other -- right brain and left brain -- and it didn’t take long for Jules and Desi to truly cherish the other like no one else on Earth...or in the sky.

“...You really are, as they say, ‘something,’ Monsieur Aquila.”

“A good something, I hope.”

“Yes. A ‘good something.’”

“Does that mean you’ll finally call me ‘Jules’ now?”

“Perhaps.”

#fantastic beasts and where to find them #hphm #hogwarts mystery #hphl #hogwarts legacy #desiree lestrange #julio aquila #yes that first quote is a doctor who reference #I couldn't resist :3

[milktyama]

— ☕︎ IF BY CHANCE

a/n: here are the imagines that anon gave me and gave me permission to expand with my own accord!! thank you anon i love this idea (and also added the song to my playlist thank you for that) ALSO longest work ever done!

— heavy reference to if by chance by ruth b.

synopsis: "if by chance... could you forgive me?"

pairing: 3rd year/adult!kageyama tobio x reader

genre: fluff to angst, hurt little comfort, in spain w/o the s

wc: 2.3k

thank you @kohi-zeri @snoozless for beta-ing! <3

❥︎ two swear words, most obvious n smallest manga spoiler

People like to emphasize how high school will be the greatest and the wildest years of your life. And a major part of high school is exploring first loves and small infatuations. High school love is so innocent and light-hearted and sometimes awkward, but that is what makes it so charming.

That is exactly how it felt being with Kageyama Tobio after meeting him in your final year of high school. Shy confessions were exchanged on the daily, pinkies linked as the main source of public affection, anything more flustering both of your young selves. 

You always thought that meeting your high school sweetheart in your last year was a sign of bad luck. It was way too late for any deep love to actually develop. It would almost feel forced or fleeting, the connection not having enough time to harvest and bloom.

Though, being with him proved that wrong. 

Having him in your life was a blessing from the moment you first encountered him on a rainy spring evening during your way home. You would’ve never expected that that day to become as significant to you back then as it does now. 

A small irregularity of Kageyama Tobio forgetting his umbrella when the weather forecast had explicitly predicted a 90% chance of raining during the evening. That night, you thought to yourself that he was  counting on the 10% chance that it wouldn’t rain, when in reality it was simply the fact that he did not check the weather forecast daily. 

Pft. You would think that being a senior in high school would mean taking up a little more responsibility, but that wasn’t the case with him. His mind still ran on the adrenaline and excitement of volleyball and volleyball alone. 

You saw him attempting to take shelter under a cherry blossom tree in the nearby park. The droplets of the rain reflected the sunlight as they landed on the light pink petals of the tree, giving it a warm and peaceful glow. 

Kageyama’s hair and clothes were damp from the minimal protection he had against the pouring rain. If you had not approached him that night and offered to share your umbrella, nothing would have happened between the two of you. 

You two would have remained as casual classmates, having small insignificant encounters that could be easily looked over: being assigned clean up duty together, collecting tests from people in your row — simple things that no one would ever think twice about. This encounter alone could have easily been part of the list of insignificant encounters… it was just a classmate looking out for another classmate right? 

But the warm kindness you showed him on that cold, rainy night had somehow reached Kageyama’s heart. What he at first thought was a mere act of kindness towards a classmate had sprouted into something a little bit more.

After that night, Kageyama found himself looking in your direction more often. His bright blueberry eyes would wander towards your figure who sat a few desks in front of him. You never caught him staring during class, but his presence was more than enough to burn through the back of your head. 

It seemed his not-so-subtle glances have rubbed off onto you because you would find your eyes starting to linger on him as well. His tall and lean figure captivated you. His raven hair, his blue eyes, his indifferent voice, and infamous “resting bitch face” were triggers your brain could not miss.

The more the days pass with your attention captivated by this man, the more you realize your feelings towards him. It was a rocky but surprisingly short journey, with both parties who faced difficulties with expressing their feelings to the other, but everything eventually fell into place, leaving it up to fate to bring both of your yearning souls together. 

And oh boy did fate put a strong magnetism between the two of you.

You fell in love with Kageyama Tobio through and through. Sure, it was a little awkward at first, with stiff movements and a sprinkle of miscommunication, but after speaking your hearts out, it became clear: you were in love with him just as much as he was in love with you. 

At least that is how it seemed. 

Even after sharing light kisses under the cherry blossom tree where you met for the first time, your hands held in his rough ones, surrounded by the smell in his clothes that you borrowed from his closet. Or passing small notes to each other during class and sleepless nights when you tried to tutor him in classes he lacked on. Or shouting from the top of your lungs whenever you attended any of his games while sporting his spare jersey. 

All these memories seemingly came crashing down a week before your graduation. 

Your ears rang after he utters a short phrase that had enough power to crash your world, enough power to make you feel as if everything you’ve done the past year had been a waste, enough power to leave you on your knees, helplessly clutching your chest as the pain starts to spread throughout your body. 

“I’m sorry. But… I think I’m in love with someone else.”

He continued to ramble endlessly. Maybe it was more apologies, or maybe he was reasoning what he’d been doing with you this past year. Maybe he was word vomiting in order to make this impact on you less heavy. Whatever it had been, you couldn’t hear it. You lost your grasp of your senses the second those words had reached your ears.

How did you not notice this? How could you not see how his glances towards you became less frequent, how his kisses grew more reluctant, how he wouldn’t reach for your hand first, how his eyes didn’t sparkle for you? You only now realized that he fell out of love. Or maybe he loved someone else all along? Or maybe you were just a game to him? You didn’t even want to consider the latter.

Your sight was blurring with tears that you desperately tried to keep in, but they had already fallen helplessly down your face. You didn’t even notice that Kageyama was no longer in front of you. 

When you finally  composed yourself, you could see his retreating figure in the distance with someone else at his side. They weren’t hugging or holding hands or kissing or anything of that sort. But watching the person you thought you could love for the rest of your life walk away with someone else was just too much for your poor heart to bear. 

It has been exactly 4 years since. You  graduated from university and did some intern work during your summers to distract yourself. You truly believed that you have finally picked yourself up and moved one. It was only after seeing him on TV, seeing that he had achieved his dream of going pro, that all the emotions came rushing back. 

You still loved him. You always have and never stopped. Your love for him was so great, so powerful, so unconditional that it never left your system, even after being broken in one of the worst ways possible. 

Maybe if he had loved you then you would still be by his side, cheering him on.  

He reached out to you a few months after your break up. With your wound still fresh, you had truly believed he called to get back together, only to get your hopes crushed. Well, not completely, at least. He called  to apologize again, figuring that back in high school you — actually, both of you — had been too emotionally distressed to properly deal with the situation. 

It was a very short call, 5 minutes at most. His apology was simple and to the point, but that was how he was. He swore he was sorry for ending things the way they did, and ended the call with a promise. He promised to never hurt you again. 

Although his heart may or may not have not been occupied by someone else during your time together, he still found comfort and familiarity when he was with you. Before he could hang up, you too apologized for how you reacted and dealt with the situation, swearing the same promise.

But that promise proved  harder to keep than you had thought. 

You encountered Kageyama once again, but this time he was with someone else. He seemed happy. It was hard to believe that even after all these years, your heart still beat for Kageyama Tobio. It hurt your heart to see him smile for someone else, knowing those smiles used to be for you. It hurt your heart to know that you were no longer the reason for his smiles being so wide, so genuine. 

You wondered if  he still recalled the memories the two of you shared. If he still sang along to the song  you two spent weeks choosing and claimed as “your song” or if he skipped it. If he still reacted to advertisements that featured your favorite lip balm, the one he loved tasting on your lips whenever you kissed. If he remembered the future plans you talked about, where the two of you would live in a comfortable apartment and how the interior would be decorated; how you would spend nights dancing around the living room. 

Either way, you were no longer part of his life. He had found someone else to dedicate his heart to. As if to confirm the dilemma that has plagued you for so long, Kageyama leaned into a kiss to the forehead of his partner, smiling as he pulled away whilst leaning his head onto his partner. 

Tears brimmed in the corners of your eyes. You ran, allowing your body to take you wherever it pleased, hot tears falling helplessly from your eyes continuously. 

So much for keeping a promise. 

Your feet finally stopped, tired, your eyes worn out from crying. You slowly took in your surroundings as you felt the warm breeze of a spring evening, soft petals tickling your sensitive skin. It was quite obvious where your heart belonged. 

You found yourself under the tree where you first met him. Where you two would often sit and exchange fleeting kisses or a small treat, feeding each other with fond eyes. The wind blew past you as the petals from the cherry blossom tree slowly fell, surrounding you in a cozy ambiance that left a bittersweet taste in your mouth. 

As your legs finally gave up at the memory that came rushing into your head, you heard footsteps that sounded like they were approaching your way. A piece of light blue cloth neatly folded entered your line of vision. Your eyes shot up to the tall figure that was now towering over you. His body faced you, however his eyes did not meet yours. 

You hesitated before slowly reaching out for the handkerchief in his hand,  avoiding his eyes as well. 

“I’m sorry…” was all that came out from his lips. There was a moment of silence, disrupted every now and then by a couple of sniffles. Kageyama tried speaking again. 

“I’m sorry for hurting you again, even after I promised you I wouldn’t.” 

“It’s fine…” you managed to choke out, voice slightly cracking. You thought you sounded pathetic. You two broke up four years ago, for fuck’s sake! A lump formed in your throat again, a mix of the remains of old memories and your own consciousness trying to bring some sense into your pained heart. 

“If by chance… could you forgive me? For breaking the promise I mean,” Kageyama asked. His words were gentle and soft, maybe a little sweet like honey, attempting to cover up any harshness. It was clear he did not want to hurt you for any longer. His blueberry eyes that you missed so much had a small sparkle to them. You wondered what that sparkle meant. 

Was it because he still loved you? Did he miss you the way you missed him? Or maybe he only felt pity for you. Maybe he was hoping for something more. What could he be possibly hopeful for? Your forgiveness? It wasn’t like you were mad at him. Afterall, it was your own fault for falling so deeply in love with him. As painful and bitter as it was, you tried your best to pull your lips upwards.

It was the saddest smile he had ever seen. 

Voices in your head screamed at the pain you felt in your heart, but your head reasoned that this was not his fault. You had to let go, once and for all. 

“Of course I forgive you.” 

The words vibrated through your skull. Your head forgave him, your self-conscious told your heart to forgive him, but in the end, it wouldn’t succumb to logic so easily. You thought with your heart rather than your head, and you absolutely hated it. You broke too easily and gave in to the way your heart beated instead of the words that were trying to break through your thick skull. 

The sun sets, warm yellow tones of the fleeting rays of sunlight shone upon the pale pink petals of the cherry blossom tree. The petals turned into a light orange colour as they fell ever so elegantly from the branches above you, surrounding your figure on the ground.

You clutched your knees to your body as you watched his figure stray from you, slowly getting further and further away. Memories from the first time you met under this same tree flooded into your head as a single tear droplet slid down your right cheek.

You felt a lump at the back of your throat. It was an awfully bitter yet mildly sweet feeling. You didn’t mean to be selfish with your feelings towards Kageyama, but if by chance, things didn’t work out with his current partner, then maybe, just maybe, he could be part of your world again.

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