#now I kind of want to write a parody of Twilight where it's set in Port Townsend

[jupitermelichios]

On a more possitive note, I’ve started watching Sword Art Online. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen (and the last film I saw in cinemas was Cats to give you context for the scale i’m working on here) and I kind of adore it in much the same way I love garbage like Smallville or Twilight. It’s so stupid on so many levels. You could challenge someone to write the worst anime, and it would almost certainly be better than SAO. It’s almost hypnotic how terrible it is.

No one should watch this terrible terrible show so I therefore don’t feel at all bad that I’m about the spoil absolutely everything, but honestly if you do also hate-watch this please come talk to me about how terrible it is. I don’t know anyone else who watches it.

Highlights of Season 1 include:

everyone is trapped in an MMO, and if you die in the MMO you die IRL. but if you were a beta-tester you’re probably fine because they just let them keep all their levels and items from the testing, so they’re all massively OP and everyone just accepts this as a normal and non-game-breaking thing

it’s a fantasy MMO but there’s no races, no magic system, no weapons except swords and maces, and not even an option to dual wield - literally all you can do in this fucking game is stand in front of an enemy and mash the attack button. I’m pretty sure they’re trapped there because the devs realised no one would play this post launch-day otherwise because it’s boring as shit

when the villain traps everyone he also just changs all their avatars to look like they do IRL for absolutely no reason, like actually none, he doesn’t even say he thinks it would be funny, he just does it and no one questions it and it is literally never mentioned again because this is the worst TV show ever animated.

in the second episode the main character deliberately witholds information about how to defeat a boss, indirectly causing multiple deaths. there is absolutely no reason for him to withhold it, he was just being a jerk because he doesn’t like people

in the third episode they reset his entire personality and he’s now a selfless hero pretending to be a lower level than he really is so people will find him more relateable and be his friend because all he wants is to help people. this is not a consequence of episode 2, they just decided they didnt like the character as he’d previously been written.

he makes some new friends who are all objectively terrible people who have decided for no season that the twelve year old who doesn’t really know how to play and keeps having anxiety attacks about the very real possibility of death has to be the guild tank. the MC is high enough level to be functionally immortal in like half the levels, but doesn’t tell anyone this he just lets them go on bullying this child

none of his friends survive that episode, in the game or IRL. which is also a christmas epsiode. a child dies in battle because she’s a terrible tank and then a man commits suicide out of guilt, so then the main character murders santa to try and bring them back from the actual dead but it doesn’t work because again, this is a video game and they are dead IRL, so then he walks off into the snow alone. Christmas!

we meet the best character in the entire show in episode 4, Rosalia, who has gone evil and started just straight murdering people because she’s sick of being an attractive adult woman who can’t get a date because she’s surrounded by lolicons who are only interested in the preteen characters (not a joke, that comes up, the show is firmly on the side of the lolicons)

in the same episode we get an extended bra and panty sequence staring an actual fucking child, like canonically this character is maybe 13 at best. this is one of only 2 occaisions when they feel the need to undress a character and it’s the fucking 12 year old, it’s so gross it reads like a parody of itself

literally every single named female character aged over 8 who talks to the MC falls in love with him after like 5 minutes (and in season 2 this includes his actual sister). he shows absolutely no interest in any of them (including his sister, thank god) until...

the main character gets engaged to a girl he only knows from an MMO after a virtual single date (he doesn’t actually win her in a PVP match but only because he looses the match, he 100% canonically tries to win her in a match, which she is apparently fine with). he then doesn’t bother to ask for her real name until the final episode, he just calls her by her screen name

(that’s okay though becuase it turns out that this moron of a love interest used her real name, on a local server, in a game where your character looks like you do IRL, because apparently getting doxxed is her hobby)

they then get in-game married off screen. there’s not even like a still of a wedding photo. nothing. the main character proposes and then the show immediately jumps to the honeymoon, it’s fucking bizarre.

they find a creepy child dressed all in white with no memory alone in the woods a week into their honeymoon who starts calling them mommy and daddy literally seconds after they first meet her, and they don’t suspect anything suss is going on and adopt her

for hilarity bear in mind the main character may only be 15 at this point (he says he’s only just turned 16 in the last epsiode, but his actual birthday is never mentioned), and his virtual wifu is 16, but no one ever questions the marriage or the adoption, even though ‘hey marriage in a video game is as important and meaningful as marriage in real life’ is an actual conversation people have multiple times. also they think the child they adopt is an actual IRL 8 year old who thinks these randos she met in an MMO are her mum and dad and everyone just goes with that like it’s a totally normal thing

a character called ‘Thinker’ agrees to meet an enemy faction leader for peace talks. the “peace talks” take place in a high level dungeon and he is told to come alone with no weapons and no fast travel. he does this. no one ever comments that his name is ironic, and in fact they seem to think that being betrayed and trapped in a dungeon with a boss is a totally unexpected turn of events Thinker could never have planned for

they take their new baby into the dungeon to rescue thinker, because they went to the jean grey school of baby rearing, and she imediately reveals that she’s actually a magical maggufin with infinite power, murders the grim reaper, and then dies. In literally the second episode she’s in

after she dies the MC hacks the admin account of the game, converts her corpse into an in game item, and saves to the local storage on his console, with the intention of bringing her back to life as a robot once they’re saved from the game. I’m not joking, that’s an actual thing that happens.

the fact that the main character can just access the main admin account and make massive game-breaking changes isn’t used again in that game and he never thinks to try and use it to force log people out or give himself infinite life so he can just rush the game and free everyone. nope, convert a corpse into an item and then never think about it again.

there’s an entire episode where all they do is go fishing. its the only filler episode in the season, and it immediately follows the death of a small child. it’s the most tone-deaf beach episode in writing history

it turns out this game, this game where they didn’t bother coding in any difference races, weapons, or any kind of magic system, was intended to have fully sentient AI therapists, because why the fuck not at this point honestly

oh also the game has PVP and you can trick the game into thinking a sleeping player is in PVP with you in order to actually murder a real person without it flagging in-game as a murder making the crime impossible for the real life legal system to investigate even though you just murdered a person. and they expect us to believe this game had actual beta testers. at least cyberpunk wasn’t played on microwaves you connected straight to your brain (also not a joke, the VR consoles canonically work by sending microwave radiation into your brain, no wonder VR never caught on)

the set up for the show is that they have to reach level 100 of a dungeon in order to win. At level 75, the writers got bored and the show just ends.

it turns out the power of love allows you to just break the fucking game and the main villain literally has a line about how ‘love allows you to remove debuffs, huh, we didn’t think to plan for that’ because again, there’s no metaphors in this show, everything is 100% literal including the fact that falling in love with another player means you’re immune to the paralysis status effect

power of love also allows you to very briefly become a poltergeist after being killed, but only for like 2 seconds. again not a joke or a metaphor, main character is killed but then gets to hang around as a ghost for a little bit to enable him to defeat the boss. he also doesn’t die in real life despite that being the entire fucking premise of the show, again because power of love.

the bad guy literally has no plan, he’s just doing shit for the sake of having something to do. His actions directly cause the deaths of more than 4,000 people, and it’s not even in aid of anything. they ask him why he trapped 10,000 people in an MMO and allowed them to slowly die, and he’s just like ‘huh, i forgot i did that, random’ and then just fucking peaces out

the fact that he committed one of the largest mass killings outside of war never really comes up again, as far as we know he doesn’t even go to jail. i think the show actually kind of thinks he’s a good guy, which is a fucking WILD moral stance to take on the deaths of 4000 completely innocent people for absolutely no reason

If this sounds hilari-bad but you don’t want to invest the time to watch a show which is objectively garbage, it has an abridged series which is famously better than the show it’s parodying (i’m dead serious, people have character arcs, the getting married after one date thing is properly addressed, the mc has to deal with PTSD because of all his friends dying in epsidode 3, they don’t immediately follow the death of a child with an extended fishing montage, the villain has an actual plan). It’s mostly actually pretty good, but this is the internet and it’s an abridged series, so while there are a lot fewer yikes moments than most it still has enough that I’m not comfortable recommending it without the caveat. that said I still enjoyed it a lot, although possibly not at much as pointing and laughing at the garbage that is the actual show.

#sao bashing #kirito bashing #sao abridged #good bad shows #i love this garbage show so much #it's one of the funniest things i've watched all year #and none of that is intentional #sword art online bashing #if you also love hate this show please come talk to me about how terrible it is

[askroahmmythril]

Reference List for amiibo Fighter Names (Set 2)

13) Ganondorf : Going Alone - A reference to the start of the original Legend of Zelda, the good ol’ “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE TAKE THIS!”  And the fact that, up to Smash 4, Ganondorf did not use his sword, despite clearly having one in his victory poses from Melee.  Many jokes were of course made about this, this is one of them.  Granted, now that he HAS his sword in Ultimate, this one’s a bit outdated, so might have to see if this one needs a revamp.  I’d still be using the Smash 4 visual style though since alas, we didn’t get an updated amiibo figure for him of his OoT style.

14) Greninja : Kerobusa - A play on kero, Japanese for the sound a frog makes, and Hayabusa, the last name of Ryu Hayabusa, star of the Ninja Gaiden series.  I wanted to parody the cutscene from the original Ninja Gaiden where Ryu is standing on a cliffside, overlooking the tower of the big bad, Jacquio.  Given Greninja was introduced in the Kalos games, I subbed in Lumiose City and its prominent central tower for the scenery.  The writing on the nameplate is from the title screen of the original Ninja Gaiden.

15) Ice Climbers : ParkaPower - Not really any sort of major reference here, I mostly stuck to the source game for this one, and just referenced that they wear parkas.  Because dangit, their parkas are adorable.  A notable difference between my version and Neo’s, he used the seal version of the normal enemy from Ice Climber, whereas I used the Topi as it’s what I was more used to.

16) Ike : SluggaBeef - This name actually came from WanStan, who donated this particular amiibo to me.  Back with the earlier amiibos, I offered an incentive for anyone who donated a Smash amiibo to allow them to name the character, and they were the only one who donated a figure and actually took me up on that offer.  Their idea was essentially just how he swings his sword with the power of a baseball bat for some hefty hits, so we played around with the idea and went with making a full-on baseball card out of it.  The 24 refers to the release number of his amiibo.

17) Jigglypuff : J-Pop - A reference to j-pop style music, and well, the fact that her name starts with a J.  And she’s a balloon, so those can pop.  Multi leveled references!  This was actually the first card I drew for the project.  I originally asked Neo if he could just like, polish up my drawings with better colors and shading, and he surprised me by going full tilt and making his own version of my rough sketch.  And thus the project was born.  This went through some various bits of retooling, such as the Love Ball being replaced with a Fairy Energy symbol on the nameplate, and also revising her hairstyle a bit.

18) Kirby : dyson - Dyson, much like Kirby, is actually a brand of vacuum cleaner.  Dyson’s commercials were famous for the designer being shown working on blueprints, saying things like “I just think vacuums should work properly,” things like that.  Since it’s his most powerful vacuum power to date, I put in a Hypernova plant on his desk.

19) Link : HeroOfAges - While a little outdated visually since we now have BotW Link as the Smash rep, again, we’re in that impasse where we didn’t get a BotW style Link amiibo specifically for Smash.  So he’s still got his Smash 4 look here.  With this one, I just wanted to reference the various Links and LoZ games throughout time.  So here we have referenced Ocarina of Time (Ocarina itself), Link to the Past (Magic Mirror), Link Between Worlds (Ravio’s bracelet), Twilight Princess (Fused Shadow), Hyrule Warriors (Link’s scarf), Skyward Sword (Beetle), the original Legend of Zelda (8-bit Wooden Sword), and the Oracles games (Harp of Ages).  Neo added some extra details on each reference as well.

20) Little Mac : Jr.Whopper - Basically just a play on, if Little Mac is to Big Mac, what would you call the Whopper equivalent?  Burger King for a long while was my go-to for fast food, though these days I probably prefer Sonic.  Still, the joke was too good to pass up.  Still amused Neo snuck the actual Burger King “King” mascot on there on his version, haha.  I have no idea why I had so much trouble drawing Little Mac’s hair, I was probably way overthinking it...

21) Lucario : AttackTurn - Yu-Gi-Oh! is one TCG I have a tendency to return to every now and again.  Given the Egyptian theming it has, it seemed a good fit for Lucario, who has an Anubis kind of feel to him visually.  Thus I set about trying to find a card that made sense as a reference to how Lucario works.  “Psychic Blade” was the best I could find.  You equip it to a monster, then pay life points in multiples of 100, up to a max of 2000.  The equipped monster then gains that much Attack and Defense.  Thus, somewhat similar to the concept of Lucario’s aura, as he gains more attack power the more damage he’s taken.  For the final card, we changed the name to “Aura of Psychic Blade” to more reference his aura.  Neo added a lot of clever references in the “card info” parts of this one, such as having the Pokémon artist shown as the illustrator, a card number referencing the Hoenn games where Lucario originated, all nice little easter eggs.

22) Lucas : Tomato Kid - Given the long time wait for an official localization of Mother 3 (I forget, DID one ever get announced?), fans took it upon themselves to make their own translation.  One of the more prominent ones I’d heard about was done by someone going by Tomato.  And thus, since in Earthbound we had Orange Kid and Apple Kid, we now have Tomato Kid.  There’s not too much else to detail here.  I literally copied a screenshot of Mother 3 pixel by pixel in Visio Home for this.  I couldn’t resist having the frog in the car, it’s just too weirdly cute.

23) Lucina : #FixFate - I admittedly don’t have a whole lot of Fire Emblem knowledge, so I had to just go with what references I could pull from.  Lucina’s game came out fairly close to around the same time as that Fire Emblem / SMT crossover type game.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions I think it was?  All I really knew about it was some of the visual style of the colored shadows walking around.  Given Lucina does have some time travel elements to her, going through time to fix her family’s past, her being in modern day Shibuya and texting on a smartphone doesn’t seem too out of the question... (okay it probably totally is but work with me here).  I snuck in a Persona 4 reference with the Calorie Magic ad, as well as a more general SMT reference with the Jack Frost phone charm.  Neo suggested adding a Splatoon ad in the background on the Shibuya tower.

24) Luigi : ReaL2401 - This is a reference to a big ol’ rumor inducing message people claimed to see on the star statue in the back garden of Peach’s castle in Super Mario 64.  Supposedly, the plaque on it said “L is Real 2401.”  People thought it was a hint to Luigi existing somewhere in the game.  Later, more well defined images showed the plaque to just likely say “Eternal Star.”  So I had the idea of Luigi leaving the message as a graffiti tag.

[gb-fics]

The Sexual Implication of Beds

Fanfiction:

Golden Bomber

Note: This fic is Jun-centric, since it’s his birthday today! <3 I actually wanted to write something in relation to the song Abare Kyoku, since Jun is such a fanboy and a few lines are referring to the lyrics indeed. However, since I couldn’t think of a way to include headbanging, etc. into a fic, I looked for another fan habit I could give Jun and ... yeah, here we are XD The story is slight self-parody for my usual kirikyan fanfiction :D

„I’ll get some snacks!“, Yutaka shouted as soon as the car pulled to an halt.

Jun got out on his side of the backseat. He stretched his arms, trying to relax after the long ride. Neither of them was a morning person and they had left Tokyo well past noon. By now, it wasn’t quite dark yet, but twilight had already set in. The streetlights across the parking lot were illuminating their surroundings.

They would arrive at the hotel shortly, but luckily Shou had insisted on a toilet break and Yutaka had whined about his low blood pressure and needing something to eat urgently. Of course, they had stopped only an hour ago for an early dinner, but that certainly didn’t inflict Yutaka’s appetite.

Jun was relieved about the last stop. When he had called the hotel from the restaurant, no one had picked up. The change would come at a short notice now, but at least there was still hope it would be possible to alter their reservation.

“I’m going to look for the toilets”, Shou announced. Yutaka had already dashed across the parking lot and vanished inside the nearest store.

“I’ll check out the store”, Kenji said and looked over at Jun, who shook his head.

“I just want to catch some fresh air”, he lied. It was too warm to spend time outside actually, but he needed an excuse to be left alone. He thought of the air conditioning inside the store and almost grew weak. Although the sun was nearly gone, the air still felt stifling. But he couldn’t give in, even if the chances he’d get through to the hotel this time were low. It was his duty to try. Someone had to. And no one was in a better position than him.

Kenji shrugged and Jun looked after him and Shou taking off, before he got out his phone.

The thing was, that Jun was Kiryuuin Shou’s biggest fan.

He had been from the very first moment he had seen him on stage. He was funny and charismatic and creative and talented and he deserved the world. Jun knew that his admiration seemed more appropriate for a fanboy than for a bandmate. But he didn’t really work with Shou on the music or even the stage programs. Just like the fans, he got confronted with the finished product. And the product always made him marvel at Shou’s wit and genius. Jun wasn’t ashamed to refer to himself as a fanboy, even if he tried to limit his outbursts in Shou’s presence, not to make his bandleader uncomfortable. But as his fanboy, Jun wanted nothing but to see Shou happy. He would do anything to provide him with the happiness he deserved.

Unfortunately, Shou seemed blind to what would make him happy. After all those years, he was still oblivious. But Jun knew. He knew better than Shou what Shou needed and he would make sure he got it in the end.

Jun would make sure, that Kiryuuin Shou noticed his love for Kyan Yutaka, and if it was the last thing he did.

Funnily enough, Yutaka didn’t seem to have noticed, either, that his perfect partner was right in front of him. They treated each other like friends. They were oblivious to the amazing couple they could be.

But even if Shou and Yutaka couldn’t see it yet, Jun had noticed. He had noticed all the small touches, the affectionate gestures, the looks they exchanged. They were meant to be. Jun lived of those little moments, their playful fights, the screenshots the fans posted. They made him trust in the fact that love was real.

He dialled the number of the hotel they were supposed to stay at before the shooting tomorrow.

From Tokyo it was quite a long trip and Kenji had driven all the way so far. Jun had tried to secure the passenger seat for himself - to enable Shou and Yutaka to spend more time together on the backseat, where it was a little more private and their hands could brush against each other accidently, or where on of them could watch the other in secret, while he dozed off. Unfortunately, Shou had won the game of rock, paper, scissor, though, and it was Jun, who had ended up on the backseat with Yutaka. He had been sulking for the entire ride.

Jun pressed the phone to his ear. The screen had heat up and felt uncomfortably warm against his cheek. His shirt was sticking to his back with sweat, too.

It took a while for someone to pick up, but finally the voice of a woman greeted him.

“Hello?”, she asked.

Jun cleared his throat, suddenly nervous. He looked around the parking lot to make sure no one was in earshot. It wasn’t the first time he pulled tricks like this, but he always felt like a criminal. Shou would get mad, if he knew.

“Hello, I’m from Golden Bomber”, he said. “The band that will stay at your hotel tonight. Our staff booked two rooms for us.”

He waited a moment for the woman to check their reservation on her computer.

“Is there a problem with the booking? Would you like to cancel?”, she asked.

“No, no.” Jun spoke hastily now, worried the others might come back, before he had made all the necessary arrangements. “I was just wondering, if we could arrange a change of rooms?”

“I need your booking code for that”, the woman said apologetic. “To confirm your authorization.”

“Sure”, Jun mumbled and quoted the booking code from memory. He had read the confirmation mail their staff had forwarded to them over and over again, until he knew it by heart.

“Great”, the woman announced. “You have booked two rooms with twin beds. Would you like separate rooms? I need to check our capacities for that.”

“No.” Jun cleared his throat again. “You see, this is a little embarrassing. But I would like to change one of the rooms to a regular double bed.”

“That is no problem”, the woman said, still friendly and very professional.

“And, uhm, if I could ask you to be, you know, a little private about it?”, Jun asked. “Me and my bandmate are, you see, kind of an item. But our colleagues don’t know about it. So, it would be good, if it looked like a booking mistake. Like, oops, we only have one twin bed room left. Two of you will have to share a bed. No single rooms available. Would that be possible?”

Although the woman could not see him, Jun felt himself blushing. He felt embarrassed at the thought she might assume he was in a secret relationship with one of the other guys. To Jun, that thought was ridiculous and absurd of course. But she might buy into it. He had figured he’d have to tell this little lie, though, for the greater cause. Shou and Yutaka would thank him later, in a few years, during their anniversary celebration.

“That is no problem at all”, the woman confirmed. “We are here to be of service.”

“Thank you”, Jun said. “We should arrive in about thirty minutes.”

“We are looking forward to your stay”, the woman said.

They exchanged their goodbyes and Jun hung up with a sigh of relief. He hadn’t actually expected it to work out this smoothly. But he had done it. He had done his part to make the world a slightly better place, in which Shou and Yutaka would love each other.

“You called the hotel”, a voice behind him announced.

Jun flinched hard, but relaxed immediately when he turned around and found Kenji standing behind him.

“You are scheming something again, aren’t you?”

Jun smiled slyly.

“I changed our reservation, so Shou and Yutaka will have to share a bed”, he declared proudly.

Kenji sighed and shook his head slightly. The heat didn’t really seem to bother him. While Jun felt awkward and sweaty, Kenji looked like he was modelling for a calendar shooting right now. Relaxed and handsome and in very good shape.

“They will be so mad, if they find out”, he said. “You should really just leave them alone. You can’t force something like that.”

Jun crossed the arms in front of his chest.

“I’m not forcing it”, he said. “I’m helping the natural course of things along.”

Kenji shook his head again.

“I don’t understand, why you want them to be together so badly. They obviously don’t care for each other romantically.”

Jun wiped his forehead absentmindedly. He considered running up to the shop as well to get himself something cold to drink. But then, Shou and Yutaka would probably be back shortly and he didn’t want to delay their trip.

“You don’t understand”, he claimed. He had always been very open with Kenji about his feelings for Shou and Yutaka. Kenji had never shared his enthusiasm, though. He did not seem to believe in their love as much as Jun did.

“They would make each other happy, if they just realized, what is right in front of them. Yutaka is actually very caring of Shou, Shou just doesn’t see it.”

Jun pulled on his shirt, hoping to prevent it from clinging to his chest even more. It was just too hot.

To his surprise, Kenji held out a full water bottle to him. It hadn’t been opened yet and the condensed water on the outside indicated that it had only just left the fridge. It would be cool and refreshing.

“Here”, Kenji said. “When you wanted to stay behind, I figured it was something stupid like that, and not that you didn’t want anything. I thought you’d like a cool drink, so I brought a bottle of water for you.”

Jun took the bottle gratefully and unscrewed the lid. That was typical of Kenji. He was very thoughtful. He also knew that Jun despised the sweet, artificial drinks, that Yutaka and Shou would have chosen.

Greedily Jun drank. The water was so cold, it hurt while he swallowed. He breathed out with relief.

“Thanks”, he announced and put the lid back onto the bottle. “Anyway, what Yutaka and Shou share is really special. Yutaka has always supported Shou, even if he thought some of his ideas were very stupid. To believe so fully in someone and wanting to see them happy even if you disagree – that’s love.”

“I disagree, but whatever you say”, Kenji said and smirked. He had a handsome smirk, too.

Jun turned the water bottle between his hands. His palms were wet from the condensation.

He wished Kenji would understand how much this meant to him.

“Ah, seems they are back”, Kenji observed and nodded across the parking lot.

Jun turned his head and felt something in his chest tightening. There they were, coming out of the grocery store together. After shopping together. Like a couple.

“Hey, Kenji”, Shou called out. “I can drive the last bit, if you are tired. It might be stressful to find the hotel and you drove for quite a while already. Unless you want to.”

“No, that would be great, I could need a break”, Kenji said and tossed the keys at Shou, who had gotten quite close by now.

Shou missed the keys and they hit the ground. He had to bent over and pick them up from the dirty pavement. He did so gingerly. It looked pretty awkward.

“Idiot”, Yutaka scolded him. He took a hearty bite out of an energy bar. The corner of his mouth was already smeared with chocolate. “How can anyone be that clumsy?”

“At least I can eat with dignity”, Shou replied and shot Yutaka a sour glance.

Jun thought their gentle bickering was adorable.

“Can I take the passenger seat now?”, Yutaka changed the topic.

Jun thought that would be a great idea. It would enable Yutaka to gaze at Shou longingly from the side, while Shou kept his eyes on the road, painfully aware of Yutaka’s presence right next to him. Oh, the longing, the pining.

“Actually”, Shou said. “I think Kenji should take the passenger seat. His legs are the longest. He always looks so cramped on the backseat. It can’t be comfortable.”

“According to that logic, you should have traded your seat with Jun earlier”, Yutaka muttered.

Shou shrugged and unlocked the car.

“I’m the leader of this band. The laws of logic don’t apply to me.”

Jun nudged Kenji in the side.

Kenji looked at him. Jun raised his eyebrows.

Kenji exhaled a little too soundly.

“Yutaka can have the passenger seat. I don’t care.”

Jun beamed at him, while he got in on the back himself. Kenji was reliable. Jun could always count on him.

Shou took a while to adjust the driver seat, so he was able to reach the gas pedal at all. Then he started the car, following the instructions of their navigation device.

Jun watched him for a moment. Shou always looked very focused while driving. Jun was surprised he had offered to take over at all. He didn’t mind driving as much as Jun did, but he wasn’t at ease as much as Kenji and Yutaka. He looked pretty, when he was concentrated, though. Jun hoped that Yutaka noticed.

He turned to look at Yutaka. He wasn’t looking at Shou, but out the window. Jun frowned.

He shot a quick glance over at Kenji, who had rested his head against the window and closed his eyes. His features looked very relaxed and even, when he was dozing off like that.

Jun turned his attention back onto Yutaka, staring at the back of his head as if he hoped to make him look over at Shou by sheer force of will.

It didn’t work. Yutaka kept gazing out the window. Jun felt highly frustrated with his bandmates. All three of them did not to understand how romance was supposed to work. At least the air conditioning was working in the car. Jun’s body started to cool down. He felt somewhat less gross and sweaty already.

When they pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, he almost dreaded getting out of the car because of the heat. After fixing his luggage from the trunk, Jun felt sweaty again. This wasn’t the season for travelling. It was the season for staying at home and hardly moving at all.

He dragged his suitcase into the lobby of the hotel. Shou and Yutaka only had backpacks with them, Kenji something that looked like a training bag. Only Jun had brought a suitcase and it was actually quite heavy. He regretted not packing more lightly.

Behind the reception desk a young woman with bangs greeted them. Jun wondered, if she was the one, he had talked to on the phone. He hoped she wouldn’t recognize him. Maybe he should have disguised his voice. The safest thing would be to stay quiet.

“Hello, nice to meet you.” As usual, it was Shou who took over the talking. “It’s Golden Bomber. We reserved two rooms for tonight.”

“Yes, of course.” The receptionist beamed at them. “Two twin bed rooms, is that correct?”

Jun’s throat started to feel uncomfortable dry. He licked his lips. Had his plan failed? Had the booking not been changed? Would Shou and Yutaka stay oblivious to their true love forever?

The woman turned to her computer.

“Oh, dear”, she said. She sounded genuinely sorry. Jun was quite sure now, that he recognized her voice from the phone. “I just see there has been a problem with your reservation. We only have one twin bed room left.”

Jun could not see Shou’s expression, since he was standing behind him. Yutaka groaned soundly, though. He still had chocolate sticking to his cheek.

“We can only offer you a regular double bed”, the receptionist continued. Jun had to give her credit for staying throughout professional. If it was up to him, he’d nominate her for the Oscars. “The price will stay the same of course.”

Shou turned around, looking at them questioningly.

“We could split up and look for another hotel. But I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble”, he observed.

“It’s not like we didn’t share beds before”, Jun said hastily.

He was aware that Kenji watched him from the side and was probably smirking.

“Well, I don’t care”, Yutaka said.

Jun took that as a good sign. Of course, he didn’t care. Secretly, he hoped to press his small, sexy body against Shou’s small, sexy body, embracing him, placing kisses all over …

“Okay, we’ll take it”, Shou said and turned back to the receptionist.

She handed him two key cards after he signed the papers.

“307 is the one with the twin beds. 306 the double bed one”, she explained sweetly. “Unfortunately, our elevator is out of service currently. You’ll have to take the stairs. We can get someone to carry your luggage, if you wish.”

Shou waved it off.

Jun thought he had been a little fast to decline the offer. After all, Shou only carried a backpack. It was Jun, who would have to drag a heavy suitcase to the third floor.

“Well, I’m sorry about the inconvenience, guys”, Shou said and held the card with the number 306 out to Kenji demonstratively.

Kenji hesitated and cast a quick glance over at Jun. Jun glared at him. Kenji did not take the card.

“Actually”, he said, obviously highly uncomfortable. Jun knew how much Kenji hated to pick an argument with about anyone. “I think you guys should share the bed. You are much smaller than me and Jun after all.”

Shou furrowed his brow.

“Also”, Jun chimed in. “Yutaka said he wouldn’t mind.”

“Sure, I don’t mind, loser”, Yutaka agreed. “Because I’m sleeping in a twin bed anyway. I don’t care how cramped up you and Kenji are sleeping.”

Jun stared at him wide-eyed. He couldn’t believe his plan would fail like that.

“But … but …”, he stammered. “It’s my birthday this month! Let me chose the room.”

“You wish”, Shou said. “Yutaka may be small, but he takes up the most space. So, we ought to get the twin beds.”

Jun turned to Kenji for help.

Kenji made a face, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. It looked oddly cute. He moved like a child, who had gotten caught doing something forbidden. His body was much too tall for such a gesture.

“I think Jun is right”, he said hesitantly. “Doesn’t he deserve to chose his room this month?”

Shou exhaled gravely.

“Fine”, he agreed. “I can share the twin bed room with Jun then. You guys take the double bed.”

“Oi!”, Yutaka shouted. “Don’t make it sound like a sacrifice! If you want Jun to sleep in a twin bed so badly, you can share the bed with Kenji!”

“Rock, paper, scissor?”, Shou suggested.

Yutaka shrugged.

Jun started to panic. Splitting Shou and Yutaka up would be even worse than them not sharing the bed. He hadn’t considered this option at all.

“Fine!”, he shouted hysteric. “We’ll take the double bed. You guys share the twin bed room.”

He snatched the key with the number 306 from Shou’s hand and picked up his suitcase. It was really heavy, but the weight wouldn’t have been a huge problem for Jun. The problem was, that he was awkward and not very good at carrying unwieldy objects in general. He dragged the luggage up the first three steps, aware that he looked completely ridiculous and didn’t exactly manage to storm off impressively.

He was highly upset. Why did Shou and Yutaka struggle against their happiness like that?

“Hey, let me take that”, Kenji said gently and caught up to him, taking the suitcase out of Jun’s hand. He carried it up the stairs easily, his gym bag in the other hand. The weight didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Jun followed him up the stairs, listening closely if Shou and Yutaka were bickering behind them, but they stayed quiet.

On the third floor, they found their doors easily. Of course, they were right next to each other. Kenji dropped Jun’s suitcase, while he waited for him to unlock the door.

Jun waited a moment, until Shou had unlocked the door to the room next to them. Somehow, he was still hoping for a change of mind.

Shou opened the door, holding it open for Yutaka, who walked past him. Jun waited until the door had fallen shut behind them, before he turned back to their own lock.

“Did you see that?”, he asked Kenji excitedly. “Shou held the door open for Yutaka! Usually, they are not that polite around each other. Maybe he is starting to acknowledge his feelings for him? I mean, holding the door open for him has to mean something! You don’t get treatment like that from just anyone. Shou was acting like a real gentleman!”

Jun pushed open their door and entered first.

“A real gentleman, indeed”, Kenji said somewhat dryly, took up Jun’s suitcase again and followed him into the room.

Jun stood frozen and stared onto the bed. It was a double bed alright, but not a very large one. It would be impossible to avoid body contact in it.

“Are you kidding me?”, Jun howled out. “It’s so small! Two people will be pressed together in there!”

“Well”, Kenji said apologetic. “If it’s bothering you, I can …”

Jun turned around to stare at Kenji wide-eyed.

“It would have been perfect!”

Jun imagined Shou and Yutaka having to share that small double bed. Damn, that would have been hot.

Kenji sighed and dropped Jun’s suitcase on the left side of the bed. He knew that Jun preferred to sleep closer to the window than to the door.

Jun sat down on the edge of the bed and hung his head low.

“I was this close”, he muttered. “This close to making all of my dreams come true.”

“If they are attracted to each other, they will figure it out in twin beds, too”, Kenji tried to comfort him.

Jun looked up to him and managed a thankful smile.

“I appreciate you trying, though”, he said. “It’s nice you support me in this. I know you don’t believe in their love.”

Kenji shrugged and started to unpack his things from the training bag.

“Do you mind, if I take a shower first?”, Jun asked. “I feel sweaty and disgusting. I really can’t force you to sleep next to me like that.”

Kenji smiled at him.

“I don’t think you are disgusting, ever”, he said. “But sure, you can go first.”

Jun collected his stuff from the suitcase, before entering the bath. He always brought a lot of cosmetics with him on trips. His hair was usually dry from dying it so often and his skin needed a lot of care, too. That was probably, why his suitcase was always so heavy. That, and the fact that he couldn’t settle for an outfit beforehand and always took too many clothes.

He stepped under the shower, and allowed the warm water to wash away his worries. He wondered, if Shou and Yutaka were taking a shower right now, too. Probably not together, Jun didn’t get his hopes up like that. But maybe Yutaka walked around the room with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist afterwards, Shou’s eyes following him through the room, taking in his bare skin and wondering, why the sight made him feel so flustered. He’d blush and Yutaka would notice, gently teasing him about it. It wouldn’t cause the ultimate confession yet, of course, just set the right atmosphere for what was going to happen later. Jun knew how stories like these were supposed to go.

He tried not to imagine things between his bandmates too vividly under the shower, though. It got him a little too excited. Two handsome men like that. Way more handsome than Jun himself at least. They would surely look good together.

He turned off the water, drying himself off with a fluffy, white towel. He wrapped it around his waist while getting ready for bed applying moisturizer, brushing his teeth, combing his hair.

Then he walked back into the room. Nudity had never been a big deal between him and Kenji. For Kenji nudity never seemed to be a big deal in any context. Jun did not feel embarrassed, even as Kenji watched him now, while he searched his suitcase for the pyjamas.

“Are you done?”, Kenji assured, after Jun had gotten dressed again and fixed himself a book to read a page before going to sleep.

“Sure”, Jun assured and made himself comfortable on the bed. “You can use the bath now.”

He watched Kenji as he got up and disappeared into the bathroom. Those hotel rooms always seemed too small for Kenji. It wasn’t just his height and his broad shoulders that looked weird in this cramped place with the small bed. Kenji usually seemed to burst with joy and enthusiasm and the small room seemed unable to contain his whole personality. When it came to character, Kenji deserved to be on a huge stage all the time, Jun thought.

He turned towards the book he was holding without even opening it.

He thought of Shou and Yutaka next door again. If something happened between them, would he even know? Would they tell their bandmates? For all that Jun knew, they might be in a happy relationship for years already. Shou hadn’t seemed too pleased with the possibility of changing roommates. But then, why not take the chance of sharing the bed? Maybe Yutaka really used up too much space in his sleep.

Jun put aside his book and checked his phone instead. He loved checking out the posts of fans, whom he followed with his fake account. There were usually cute pictures of Shou and Yutaka together. Sometimes, very rarely, there were pictures of himself, too. He always scrolled past them very fast.

Of course, occasionally he felt weird about swooning over his bandmates like this. When he wanted to see them, he didn’t have to stare at pictures on his phone like a creep. He could go over next door and knock. It was different for the fans, who didn’t know them in person. Jun should have a little more respect for their privacy. However, there was something soothing in fading in with the crowd of fans. They all wanted the same thing. They wanted Shou and Yutaka happy together. It was a goal they shared, something that made Jun escape from his own life and his own worries for a little while.

Kenji entered the room again. Jun looked up shortly. Kenji was naked. He hadn’t even bothered with a towel around his waist. Jun looked back onto his mobile screen.

There was a moment of silence, in which Kenji towelled off his hair.

“You think we could hear them, if they banged?”, Jun asked without looking up. “The walls seem to be quite thin.”

Kenji chuckled.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen”, he observed.

Jun sighed.

“You are right. They have twin beds. Nothing will happen between them”, he agreed.

Kenji pulled a goofy face. It did nothing to hide his handsomeness, though.

“I don’t think the problem is the beds.”

Jun shook his head and finally lowered his phone to get a better look at Kenji. He kept his eyes fixed on Kenji’s face, though.

“If they had to share the bed, they’d surely have sex. If there is only one bed, the potential couple is bound to have sex. Don’t you read at all? It’s science.”

Kenji snorted and put the towel over the backrest of the armchair by the window.

“I don’t see how that should be science”, he said.

“Well, think of all the sexual tension it would create. Shou and Yutaka in a bed together this small. Their limbs would brush against each other. They could sense each other’s body heat. The sexual tension would get sheer unbearable. There is only one blanket, too. They’d have to snuggle up to each other, painfully aware of only the thin layer of clothing keeping them apart.”

“Yeah, about the clothing”, Kenji interrupted him. “I kind of thought we’d have separate beds and you know I prefer to sleep naked. I didn’t bring pyjamas. You won’t feel harassed by that, will you?”

Jun waved it off absentmindedly. He had spent so much time around naked Kenji already, sleeping next to him like that wouldn’t feel weird at all.

“Sure, I don’t care”, he said nonchalantly and turned back to his phone.

Kenji pulled back the blanket to sneak in next to Jun. The bed really was small and Kenji took up a large part of it. His upper arm was resting against Jun’s, but there wasn’t enough space for either of them to back off. This would be a very cuddly night.

“Don’t tell me you’re staring at pictures of them again?”, Kenji assured and peaked over Jun’s shoulder.

Jun shuffled a little closer, snuggling up against Kenji’s shoulder, so Kenji could get a good look at his phone screen, too.

“Look at this!”, he said and zoomed in. “The way Yutaka looks at Shou here. Full of hunger and greed and longing and affection. He is clearly in love.”

Kenji sighed. Jun could feel the heaving of his chest against himself.

“I think he is looking past Shou at the buffet actually. You remember? There was a live barbecue that day.”

Jun flicked his tongue and he pulled back from Kenji again, trying to create a distance that was impossible to achieve in the small bed.

“You just lack sense of romance”, he declared.

Kenji gave nothing but a low hum.

Eventually Jun put his mobile aside, picking up his book again. He held it in his hands indecisively. Reading a novel was surely more acceptable than engaging in weird fantasies about his colleagues. But he felt weirdly distracted and unfocused.

“Hey, Jun”, Kenji said softly.

Jun turned his head, surprised to find Kenji had rolled to his side and was watching him currently.

“Why is it so important to you? This whole thing with Shou and Yutaka? It’s really starting to get out of hand lately. I don’t mean to lecture you. I’m worried.”

Jun sighed and put his book back onto the bedside table. He didn’t know where to look, so he kept his eyes on the opposite wall.

“Reality is just unsatisfying”, he confessed lowly. “I’m feeling sick with worry all the time and just … dizzy with everything that’s going on currently. I need to believe in something nice.”

“But why them?”, Kenji asked. He had dropped the topic many times before already, but Jun had the feeling, that today he would keep pushing. “You could believe in world peace. Or romantic comedies. Why Shou and Yutaka?”

Jun exhaled soundly, then he rolled over, too, so he could face Kenji. He was the only one with whom he had ever talked about his obsession. With Kenji he didn’t have secrets. It was work that had brought them together. He knew a handsome, sporty guy like Kenji would never had ended up in Jun’s company otherwise. Still, he was his best friend.

“I just want to believe that a love like that exists. Supporting someone else with a crazy concept like an air band. Always fighting, but knowing you’ll never break up, because your love is just too strong, turning all the arguments gentle and playful. I want to believe someone could look at me the way that … Yutaka looks at barbecues.”

Kenji chuckled at Jun’s admittance. He remembered where Yutaka had looked that day. It hadn’t been at Shou.

“Also”, Jun added. “I really admire you guys, but especially Shou. He is a huge role model for me. It would mean so much to me, if … if we were the same, you know? If he validated the things I felt. It would be great to know he’s in love with another man.”

Kenji reached out, gently touching Jun’s lower arm.

“Hey”, he said quietly. “You don’t need him to feel the same to be valid. And if it’s about wanting to be loved … why don’t you ask for something for yourself? Why not fantasize about Shou yourself, if you admire him so much?”

Jun could hear the hesitation in Kenji’s voice. He didn’t seem too excited about the perspective of Jun crushing on Shou.

Jun smiled sadly.

“I don’t know, for me, the world just seems to be on hard mode. I don’t really believe I could ever find that kind of love and keep it. It’s unrealistic. I want to believe it’s possible for them, though. They deserve it.”

“You deserve it, too”, Kenji said.

“Also, imagining them together is just hot”, Jun added. “I can’t imagine anything that hot involving myself. I’m awkward. I’d ruin my own fantasy.”

Kenji chuckled again and nudged Jun’s chin lightly.

“Okay, fine”, he said, obviously not willing to argue, although he usually scolded Jun for being too self-deprecating. “But why Shou and Yutaka? You might as well ship me with one of them.”

“They have chemistry”, Jun snorted, trying to dismiss the question.

“I do have chemistry with Yutaka as well”, Kenji clarified. “We’re close. And you know, that I actually do like men. Neither Shou nor Yutaka ever confirmed something like that. It would be logical to think of me first.”

Jun looked at Kenji’s chest, instead of meeting his eyes.

He imagined Kenji kissing Yutaka. It didn’t cause the warm fluttering in his chest, that he experienced whenever he imagined Shou and Yutaka together. Instead, his whole stomach bolted and he felt like throwing up.

He raised his gaze, meeting Kenji’s eyes. Their dark brown was tender, as always when he looked at Jun.

“I’m not good at asking for things myself”, Jun confessed quietly, his voice hoarse. “That doesn’t mean I’m selfless. Even if I don’t dare to want something, it doesn’t mean I can bring myself to share.”

Even if Jun didn’t dare to watch Kenji for too long, while he dozed off in the car. Even if he didn’t dare to think about the fact that he wasn’t wearing any clothes right now too intensely. He couldn’t bring himself to even imagine Kenji kissing someone else.

“You know”, Kenji said and reached for Jun’s hand. He took it and placed it against his chest, right above his heart, holding it in place. Jun could not sense his heartbeat, but he sensed how warm Kenji’s body felt and how smooth his skin. “You are allowed to want.”

Jun swallowed hard. He had known he was allowed to want for a long time already. Kenji had made that more than obvious. But still, Jun hadn’t dared.

“If it’s Shou and Yutaka”, he started hesitantly. “It’s not my fault, if it doesn’t work out. I can hope, and I can fantasize. But I don’t have to act on it and I can’t do anything wrong, that will ruin it. I can be happy, when I think about them, but I don’t have to be scared. It will never be my fault and it will never be me getting heartbroken. There is always a risk when you want things for yourself.”

“Don’t be scared”, Kenji whispered.

And Jun looked at him and finally allowed himself to let his eyes linger. He saw Kenji’s handsome features, his beautiful smile, his dark eyes - that always followed Jun through every room. And he allowed himself to feel his body against himself, the heat they were sharing underneath the one blanket. And with Kenji this close to himself, he hardly felt scared at all.

 *

“Oh no”, Yutaka groaned, when the moaning started. The walls of the hotel were so thin, they were able to hear everything perfectly.

“Ha!”, Shou exclaimed happily from the twin bed at the other side of the room. “Told you. Only one bed. It’s science!”

#Golden Bomber #utahiroba jun #Darvish Kenji #Kiryuuin Shou #Kyan Yutaka #fanfiction #fanfic #not sure which one to tag so I'm using both #darupa #kirikyan #Happy birthday Jun~

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we’ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that’s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

#momestuck #lets read hiveswap friendsim #sex cw

[vintage1der]

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.” Devotees of fanfiction will sometimes tell you that it’s one of the oldest writing forms in the world. Seen with this generous eye, the art of writing stories using other people’s creations hails from long before our awareness of Twilight-fanfic-turned-BDSM romance Fifty Shades of Grey: perhaps Virgil, when he picked up where Homer left off with the story of Aeneas, or Shakespeare’s retelling of Arthur Brookes’s 1562 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. What most of us would recognise as fanfiction began in the 1960s, when Star Trek fans started creating zines about Spock and Captain Kirk’s adventures. Thirty years later, the internet arrived, which made sharing stories set in other people’s worlds – be they Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or anything and everything in between – easier. Fanfiction has always been out there, if you knew where to look. Now, it’s almost impossible to miss.

In the last few years, fanfiction has enjoyed something of a rebrand. Big-name authors such as EL James, author of the Fifty Shades books, and Cassandra Clare, who has always been open about writing Harry Potter fanfiction before her bestselling Mortal Instruments series, have helped bring it into the mainstream. These days, it’s fairly common knowledge that some people just really like writing about Captain America and Bucky Barnes falling in love, or Doctor Who fighting demons with Buffy. The general image of fanfiction has brightened somewhat: less creepy, more sweetly nerdy.

But the divide between fanfiction and original writing holds strong. It’s assumed that if people write fanfiction, it’s because they can’t produce their own. At best, it functions as training wheels, preparing a writer to commit to a real book. When they don’t – as in the famous case of Fifty Shades, which one plagiarism checker found had an 89% similarity rate with James’s original Twilight fanfiction – they are ridiculed. A real author, the logic goes, having moved on to writing their own books, doesn’t look back.

“Here’s the thing,” Naomi Novik explains over the phone from New York. She is the bestselling author of the Temeraire books, a fantasy series that adds dragons to the Napoleonic Wars, and Spinning Silver, which riffs on Rumpelstiltskin. “I don’t actually draw any line between my fanfiction work and my professional work – except that I only write the fanfiction stuff for love.”

In between writing her novels – or indeed during, as she admits that fanfiction is one of her favourite procrastination techniques – Novik is an active member of the fanfiction community. She is a co-founder of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the most popular hosting websites, and a prolific writer in the universes of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Merlin and many more.

And she’s not the only professional at work. Rainbow Rowell, the bestselling author of Eleanor and Park and other novels, once told the Bookseller that between two novels, she wrote a 30,000-word Harry Potter fanfiction. “It’s Harry and Draco as a couple who have been married for many years, and they’re raising Harry’s kids,” she said. “It’s them dealing with attachment parenting and step-parents and all these middle-aged issues.”

The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original fiction writer can look very arbitrary when looking at authors such as Michael Chabon, who once described his own novel Moonglow as “a Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic”. Or Madeline Miller, whose Orange-prize winning The Song of Achilles detailed the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and whose latest novel Circe picks up on the witch who seduces Odysseus in the Odyssey. Miller said she was initially worried when one ex-boyfriend described her work as “Homeric fanfiction” but has since embraced her love of adapting and playing with Greek mythology. The tag could also be applied to classics such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, reworkings of Shakespeare by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Edward St Aubyn in the Hogarth series, and a spate of parodies: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina.

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.”

Others may find it odd that published authors would bother writing fanfiction alongside or between their professional work. But it’s all too simple to draw lines between two forms of writing that, in their separate ways, can be both productive and joyful. Neil Gaiman once wrote that the most important question an author can ask is: “What if?” Fanfiction takes this to the next level. What if King Arthur was gay? What if Voldemort won? What if Ned Stark escaped?

“I believe that all art, if it’s any good, is in dialogue with other art,” Novik says. “Fanfiction feels to me like a more intimate conversation. It’s a conversation where you need the reader to really have a lot of detail at their fingertips.”

For writers still wobbling on training wheels, fanfiction offers benefits: the immediate gratification of sharing writing without navigating publishers; passionate readers who are already interested in the characters, and a collegial stream of feedback from fellow writers.

“There was an audience of people who wanted to read my writing,” says young adult author Sarah Rees Brennan, who wrote Harry Potter fanfiction in her teens and twenties before she published her own novels, the latest of which, In Other Lands, was a Hugo award finalist. “Here were all these people online who wanted stories about familiar characters. Audiences were pre-invested and waiting.”

For writers, whether already published or on the path to being published, this instantaneous readership functions as a writer’s workshop: Novik calls it a “community of your peers”. Spending hours thrashing out the details of Draco Malfoy’s inner life can’t help but function as a crash course in character motivation. And the limits and constraints of working within a pre-existing world, with its own characters and settings, is a unique challenge.

“Fanfiction is a great incubator for writers,” Novik says. “The more constraints you have on you at the beginning, the better. It’s why people do writing exercises, or play scales. That kind of constraint forces you to practice certain skills, and then at a certain point you have the control to bring out the whole toolbox.”

Once some writers get those tools, they never look back. Rees Brennan no longer writes fanfiction. “I had a friend say it’s like the difference between babysitting kids and having children of your own,” she says. “With a world you built yourself, and characters you built, there’s this sense of deep, overwhelming love.”

But Rees Brennan is still a fan of collaborative writing and shared universes, as in the short stories she writes with Cassandra Clare about characters from Clare’s Mortal Instruments universe. “It’s amazing to gather around a kitchen table and yell at each other excitedly about what’s going to happen to mutually beloved characters,” she says. “I want that for every creative person – a chance to find their imaginative family, wherever it may be.”

Novik scorns the idea that published authors should turn their back on fanfiction. She recalls being on a panel where one member said he couldn’t understand why someone would waste their time writing it over an original work: “I said, ‘Have you ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your own music?’”

“When I was first published, I deliberately went to my editors and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been writing fanfiction for 10 years. I love it.’ It was non-negotiable for me. As soon as you do that, by the way, it turns out that like half of the publishing industry has read or been involved in fanfiction,” she laughs. “Shockingly! It’s amazing how all these women who like storytelling have some connection to the community.”

For Novik and many other writers, fanfiction is a fundamental a way of expressing oneself, of teasing out new ideas and finding a joyous way to engage with writing again after the hard slog of editing a novel. The journey to become a published writer isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral, as we grow older and continue to explore the characters and tropes we love. There’s so many stories waiting to be told – perhaps one or two of them could involve getting Captain America laid. God knows he needs it.

#creative writing #books #culture #fiction #fanfiction #The Guardian

[aion-rsa]

An A.P. Bio Season 4 Episode Guide with Showrunner Mike O’Brien

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Fittingly for a show about high school, A.P. Bio’s writers are often tasked with the least enjoyable aspect of education: homework.

“One of the ways we try to find new areas in stories is just by writing assignments and homework,” A.P. Bio showrunner Mike O’Brien tells Den of Geek. “We’ll all go home and write. I often call them sketches or scenes – just some little thing.”

O’Brien’s homework assignments have apparently paid off as they’ve allowed the comedy to reach four seasons, the first two of which aired on NBC and the following two on streaming service Peacock. 

A.P. Bio is set in the fictional Whitlock High School in Toledo, Ohio and follows disgraced Harvard philosophy professor Jack Griffin (Glenn Howerton) as he returns home to teach some eager nerds A.P. Biology. Unfortunately for the nerds, Jack has no intention of teaching them A.P. Biology and instead forces his students to join him on missions to address his many petty slights and grievances. Fortunately for the nerds, some lessons are learned despite Jack’s most sincere efforts not to instill any.

With all eight episodes of A.P. Bio season 4 available to stream on Peacock now, we caught up with O’Brien to discuss the journey so far. And since we’re thorough, we decided to ask about each of season 4’s eight episodes. 

Read along with our A.P. Bio season 4 syllabus below.

Season 4 Episode 1 “Tornado!”

“Tornado” begins with a set up that should be familiar to many current and former Midwestern students: a tornado drill. The concept of avoiding the mighty power of a tornado by gathering in a hallway and hoping it doesn’t notice you is ripe for comedic possibilities. A.P. Bio, however, decides to take things in a bit of a different direction. This premiere is a vessel for the students of Whitlock High to share slash fiction stories about their teachers with one another.

“One of the writers in the room, Jess Lacher, wrote the cold open of ‘Tornado’ almost word for word,” O’Brien says. “That stayed pretty much as is. We were like, ‘Maybe this is a whole episode.’”

Naturally the excursion into one of fandom’s most treacherous pastimes required some preliminary investigations. 

“We did a decent amount of research (into slash fiction). I tried to get into the origins a little bit of it, which seemed to be maybe Spock and Kirk.”

As of press time, there is no available slash fiction about A.P. Bio characters that I’m aware of…yet.

Season 4 Episode 2 “Sweatpants”

The simplest of actions lead to the grandest of consequences on A.P. Bio. In this episode, that action is a dress code policy to curb bullying. The consequence is the formation of a cult, naturally. 

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A.P. Bio Season 3 Preview: School’s Back In Session

By Alec Bojalad

“We were trying to use some of the tropes of real cults,” O’Brien says. “I feel like I’d just seen Midsommar, and I’ve been a fan for a long time of The Source Family. There’s so many good fiction and nonfiction cult movies and things to talk about, that writers are always talking about and imitating.”

What makes A.P. Bio’s cult particularly interesting is that it centers on sad sack student Victor (Jacob Houston).

“More than anything, we wanted to put it through Victor’s filter. So things he likes and hates are all given Jonestown-level of intensity.”

And that’s how you get delightfully strange scenes of a whole classroom yelling “Divorce! Divorce!” at things they don’t like. 

Season 4 Episode 3 “An Oath to Rusty”

Following his break-up with the lovely Lynette (Elizabeth Alderfer), Jack needs some friends. Unfortunately, the only way he knows how to go about getting them is by asking them to play the world’s hardest board game

“I found Twilight Imperium by Googling ‘hardest games to learn.’ It’s always in the top five. It’s a lot,” O’Brien says. “Talk about going down deep rabbit holes. I spent more time learning tutorials on YouTube for that game than anything else.”

While Jack’s relationship struggles, this episode spends plenty of time with a trio of characters who are thick as thieves. Stef Duncan (Lyric Lewis) and Mary Wagner (Mary Sohn) find themselves frustrated with their friend Michelle Jones’s (Jean Villepique) refusal to tell them what case she worked on during jury duty. According to O’Brien, this is another concept that came directly from the writing staff’s “homework assignments.”

“That was a homework assignment from David Neher, who plays Geology Dave on the show. He just randomly brought in as his homework one time a thing where Stef and Mary are doing police sketches of a fully misunderstood thing from Michelle, who isn’t saying anything about her boring trial she was a jury member for.”

Season 4 Episode 4 “Tons of Rue”

Though the delightful Joe Manganiello notably pops up later on, cult movie star Bruce Campbell is A.P. Bio season 4’s biggest get. The beloved Evil Dead actor portrays Jack’s scumbag father who is trying to turn over a new leaf.

“That was so cool,” O’Brien says of bringing Campbell aboard. “He’s not as well known as Tom Cruise, but his fans are all fever pitch fans. Certain crew members and a handful of the writers were going nuts. I think Glenn was a big fan and really excited.”

Unfortunately for Howerton’s Jack, his father’s instincts to flee when things get too real win out again in the end. Though Campbell’s time on the show was brief, he left a big impact behind the scenes, according to O’Brien.

“He’s just so nice. I guess you’d hope it’s either that, or he’s like a weird psychopath that requires tiny orange juices to keep coming to work. But he’s gregarious and funny and nice and does a great job with the script. I loved having him around. I was a big Evil Dead fan in college, so it was the best.”

Season 4 Episode 5 “The Perfect Date From Hell”

So I’ll be frank: we ran out of time to discuss “The Perfect Date From Hell” with Mike O’Brien. And that’s a shame as there’s quite a bit going on here! From the introduction of Jack’s new love interest Shayla (Hayley Marie Norman) to Principal Durbin (Patton Oswalt) going all Undercover Boss, there was certainly plenty to unpack. Oh well, next time we’ll get to hear all about Durbs’ disturbing prosthetics.

Onto the next one!

Season 4 Episode 6 “Love, for Lack of a Better Term”

This is Victor’s second big showcase episode of the season, after serving as a cult leader in “Sweatpants.” This time around things are a lot less sinister. This half-hour serves as a parody of ‘90s teen romance movies (Third Eye Blind soundtrack and all) in which a lovable schlub goes for the popular girl and can’t realize his true love was in front of him the whole time. 

“It ended up being a big Victor season. He kind of takes over this episode and has a couple of other really great moments,” O’Brien says.

Despite Victor’s clear status as MVP, O’Brien says it’s important for each student character to get their time in the sun. 

“I would say I hope that all of (the students) shine at different moments, because they’re all so talented. It’s on the writing team to make sure we aren’t letting any of them slip through the cracks, even for one episode.”

Season 4 Episode 7 “Malachi”

It’s no secret that comedy titan Paula Pell is a big part of A.P. Bio’s success as school secretary Helen Henry Demarcus. Through three seasons, the show has treated her as a Paul Bunyan-esque character, capable of astonishing feats and fit to bursting with a positively insane backstory. While Helen has quite the internal history on A.P. Bio, the show has not yet fully reckoned with her as a sexual being until this season. And this is the episode that delves furthest into Helen’s horny heart to amazing success. 

“She’s in and out of relationships that aren’t great all the time,” O’Brien says. “We cast Paula’s wife who is a very funny comedy writer and performer. That not only was really fun and exciting, because we know Janine (Brito), but in the midst of a very tense February and March COVID shoot it was a little bit of a relief for Paula and Janine to be able to kiss.”

The story of Paula and a waitress at a local bar’s torrid (and quick) love affair is quite madcap. But according to O’Brien, the show has considered some other off-the-wall possibilities for Helen’s love life in the past.

“We pictured she had a girlfriend who works on one of those fishing boats in Alaska, like Deadliest Catch. She’s there 363 days a year and then on one day Helen calls their “Purge dating day’, they try to have dinner, make out, and go to an amusement park and a concert, all in one day. That was probably a little too wacky.”

Season 4 Episode 8 “The Harvard Pen”

“The Harvard Pen” has a high concept befitting a season (or perhaps series?) finale. The episode flashes back all the way to Jack Griffin’s first day with the A.P. Bio class, which is somehow only “a few months earlier.” Jack gives one golden rule to the assembled students: never touch his Harvard pen. Naturally they do, and the episode follows the pen’s months-long journey to eventual oblivion.

Ultimately though, the real standout in this installment is the web series that the A.P. Bio kids have been producing with Heather (Allisyn Snyder) starring. Janet Fist is a ‘70s style cop drama in which the titular character is a receptionist who has an incredible ability to solve crimes…and to shoot everyone she sees full of lead.

“I used to write a lot of short stories about a ‘70s renegade cop that I would read when I was in improv in Chicago,” O’Brien says. “I thought ‘what if that was through the eyes of this kind of quirky high school girl? Maybe she’s not even allowed to be a cop in the ’70s.’ It becomes this kind of feminist statement that Heather wants to make. It was just really fun to write after that.”

If a fifth season of A.P. Bio isn’t in Peacock’s plans, we’re gonna need to go all-out on a Janet Fist spinoff fan campaign.

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A.P. Bio season 4 is available to stream on Peacock now.

The post An A.P. Bio Season 4 Episode Guide with Showrunner Mike O’Brien appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3mUWqJx

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[tobias4now]

ADIRONDACKS

“Fuck, this doesn’t fit a human body!” I yelped as my body molded to the harsh contour of the chair

“Oh, shush,” my mother jabbered taking a long, slow sip from her mint julep, “I, think they’re lovely.”

           She was talking about the Adirondack chairs that dotted the premises of this small, yet admired lakeside resort. They came in many different colors; sunshine yellow and a rich sky blue, pine green and a popular cherry-pop red. They were iconic here; all of the branding and logos for the resort somehow used the chair, it being a symbol of New England rusticity and charm. Set up in the dozens, they looked upon the various view. Atop a grassy hill , you could see the distant, soaring mountains of New York state, or the beach where the cool waters of the lake skittered in the breeze.

“And besides,” she continued, “Why do you have to ruin everything. Aren’t some things just . . . Nice?”

“Well these things are diagnosing me with early arthritis.”

           She turned her head towards me. I could see the burning in her eyes even behind her sunglasses and cool, polite exterior. I could see the fuel and the steam and the sweat she was producing, the clenching of her tight, New England façade as she said, “We. Are. Here­. To relax. Joseph.”

           I could tell how mad she was because she used my full name - Joseph. Usually only referring to me as Joe, she would reserve my full name for times when I was being particularly unpleasant, like on this trip. Joseph. I always thought it was funny that she named me something so Old Testament. As anyone could attest, though not in religiosity but in spirit, she was clearly of the newer variety. From my perspective, this name, would reveal her for what she truly was, and that was something that she dedicated much of her life to hiding. She, my mother, was a Jew. And from the Christmas sweaters to our white plank wood house, it was clear to me that she tried all she could to hide this. I never knew why she was so ashamed. But all I knew is that she was, and her efforts were clear and direct.

 “It is just beautiful. Isn't it?”

“Yes. It is.” The wind ran though us, an apparition, and then, the still and silent glory of the lake.

“Where’s your father?”

“Golfing, I think.”

“He sure loves golfing.”

“Yup,” I closed my eyes for a moment. The disjointed back of the Adirondack chair was beginning to saw away at my spine.

“I’m gonna go,” I stood up with a gasp and walked away.

“Make sure to meet us at the lodge for dinner!” She yelled doing her best Mrs. Brady impression.

             I went to dinner around twilight. I wore a cowboy shirt that I got at a thrift shop in Brooklyn. Roses and ropes and other Americana emblems were sown into its shoulders, and wearing it, I had the satisfying feeling of parodying this whole patriotic establishment. My family thought it was strange.

           We sat in a big circle, my father’s orange skin contrasting the harsh white of his seersucker suit. My mother sat elegantly on his side, and my sister, blonde, straight hair glowing in the dining room luminescence, sat at her side My aunt and uncle, and their triplet sons all sat together, all looking similarly nautical.  

“Joe? What did you do today?” My uncle questioned.

“I, uh, I kind of lied by the beach for a little bit.”

“Relaxing?”

“Very relaxing.” I mumbled.

“So, Joe!” My uncle, fat and pink and plump as a potato chimed in, “You starting college this year?”

           I could feel my mother’s body clench at that word – college. We’ve said it so much this past year, and now she had to face the reality.

“Well, no, not exactly. I’m actually gonna take a gap year.”

“A what?”

“A gap year. It's a year to work and figure some stuff out, and then, I might go to college.”

“He will go,” My mother interjected.

“You guys ready?” said a sharp, sweet voice from above. It was our waitress. She was beautiful. Her eyes deep and dark like a bubbling lagoon, her skin soft and supple, her hair in a thick braid down her spine.

“I think we are!” My father said rubbing his belly, “I’ll get the filet, medium rare.”

           When it was my turn, I stuttered and looked down. I was scared to look her directly in the eyes. She was stunning, but I was embarrassed. I could only imagine her assumptions about me as she saw me sitting with this toddler sailing team.

             Our food came soon after. And as soon my father saw the grey, overdone beef, I could already see him preparing how he would perfectly express his discontent.

“Hello?” he waved down our waitress, “Hi, yeah this is completely overdone . . . I said medium rare, right?” He was condescending and pompous. I felt an anger that she had probably numbed long ago.

“Oh yes, sorry sir. I’ll go check in with the kitchen.”

He waited a moment and then said, “You know some of these people that come from these island countries, I don't think they can always understand our English. It’s very different you know.” He said this as she was walking away, but I know she heard. His smugness disgusted me, how he could dehumanize her like that. She was so beautiful, fragile yet strong, and I knew that this was not the first remark she had heard like that. Come to think of it, she was the first person I saw that was not some pink or orange form of Caucasian in the whole resort. I wanted to throw my Shirley temple right in his face, redden his crisp new seersucker. When his steak came back, perfectly pink and red, I made a silent prayer that she had spit in his food.

             My father golfed all day. So with daddy golfing with his brother, the rest of our family was largely left to fend for ourselves. Over the week we all found our routines; my sister would go to the kids camp to paint pots and paddle boat, my cousins would simulate killing games and my mother would close her eyes and bake under the lakeshore sun. I, on the other hand could find nothing to ease my overbearing boredom. I couldn't read, definitely could not write, and my few attempts at socializing with the other kids my age ended in these terrible awkward head nods, like I just walked in on something. So I kept my mother company most of the time, us jabbing at each other with our infinite insults and resentments. I loved fetching favors for her, just so one day she would owe me.

 “Joseph, go get me a Julep please,” hummed my mother.

           I sauntered over to the lakeside bar, where, to my horror, our waitress from the previous night was serving cocktails. I didn’t want to face her, yet I also wanted to more than anything in the world. I wanted to apologize and somehow elevate myself above my family that was less racially enlightened than I.

“Hey,” I beamed, “Can I get one julep, and one uh . . . White Russian?” I wanted alcohol and that was the only cocktail I knew.

“You have I.D?”

“Oh, shit, I uh . . . left it in my room.”

“Sure,” she smiled at me, scooping ice into a plastic cup. “White Russian. Hah! Don't get that order much these days!”

“I need something strong.”

“Oh why? Too hard to lie on the beach all day?”

“Yeah. Very relaxing. The Third Reich screaming into my ear all morning.” My cousins were playing a disturbing game of Germans vrs. Americans around the beach, their howls scraping our ear drums with their Germanic geibberish.

“I’ll give you that. That’s pretty annoying.” We smiled at eachother as she served up my special drink. I sat down at the bar. She looked me up and down and then laughed; “You clean up well.” She was remarking on my swim suit, the same one I’ve had since middle school. It was neon yellow like a traffic sign. On top of that it was pretty much a speedo at this point, my junk almost completely visible through its thin neoprene.

“Thanks, I appreciate it. You like my cowboy shirt last night?”

“Loved it! First piece of clothing without little whales all over it I’ve seen this summer.”

“What, you don't like our cool American style?”

“Cool?”

“Okay, maybe not so much.” I paused. “Where are you from?”

“Jamaica!”

“Oh Jamaica! I’ve been to Jamaica, it’s beautiful. Stayed in Montego.”

“Yeah it is. But not in the way you’re thinking.” She was cool and angry and beautiful. Her teeth shot at me with blazingly white light. I could tell she was somehow always rebelling against something.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s home and I love it, but it’s not the white sand hotels you know. We’re not just drinking dacharies all day.” Of course. I felt so stupid.! I must’ve sounded like the kind of American, imperialist, tourist asshole that I hate. “But no worries. I don't think you’re gonna be hanging out in the middle of Kingston either.”

“Who knows? I do love jerk chicken.”

“Bet you’ve never had real jerk chicken!”

“No, no, no, that, right there is where you’re wrong. Once a moth, my friend and I, we take the train all the way into the Bronx and we get the best jerk in the world. Better than Kingston I’m telling you. Rice, beans, oxtail.” She handed me my drink.

“Oxtail?”

“I don't play around . . .” I tried to look at her nametag.

“Joy,” she said.

“Joy.” We looked at eachother for a moment, the sun dancing behind her and her hands gracing the borders of mine. Her smile was sweet, her gums revealing themselves and her tongue in a perpetual dance behind them. I sipped my white Russian, all confident and smooth and immediately choked up a little.

“White boy can’t drink the white Russian, no?”

           I laughed for a moment and then, the piercing bird call of my mother. “Jooooooooooe!”

“Oh shit, the julip.”

“Right.”

           She threw it together in a second. Her movements were like magic. She handed the bubbling concoction to me as if she was dancing.

“I’ll see you later Joy.”

“Later  . . . Jooooooooooe”

             After our usual dinner, I ran away from my family and hid in my room. I couldn’t take it anymore -The pompousness and privilege of it all! The mashed potatoes and the steamed veggies. My father shooting the shit with his brother and my cousins and sisters prancing like cherubs as they clawed at their mothers knees like ravenous wolves. Their lives were incomplete and useless. They were so normal and comformative it disgusted me. I though of what my friends would say about this - Us, in our plaids and flannels and stained T-shirts - Us, listening to Joy Division like Russian scholars -  Us, the artists and producers and actors and writers. Us, the haters of the mundane, the golfers and businessmen. They would hate me for being here. I hated myself.

           As I tried to read in the lamp light of my room, I began to hear a rumbling and unusual stirring from my parent’s room. It was the zipping of a bag, and the befuddled and pathetic pleading of my mother.

He left in a hurry. And as their arguing continued I could hear my mother try harder and harder to hang onto to him– a plank of wood in a rushing river. And I could hear, simply in her tone, the crumbling of everything she thought important.

When my father came into my room, I turned off the lamp and pretended to be asleep. I could hear him sniffle as he wallowed in the image of my sleeping body.

“I have to.”

             Later that night, I sneaked out of our hotel room to follow the dark and silent path to the lake. There, I sat, and watched over the bubbling black water as a great haze was cast upon the world by the pale-lit moon. I tried to write. Thinking that my bombardment with the kind of absurdist Americana that was the foundation for all great art would lead to my own prophetic discovery. In vain, trying to describe the orange of their spray tans, the crisp whiteness of their freshly laundered polos, ticky-tacky lawns and Marciano cherries. But, nothing came. It all sounded so trite and clichéd and my vision of having some miraculous epiphany in the night, deteriorated. All I was left was myself, the moon and the lake that waved in the wind like the American dream itself.

           A single orange light illuminated through the dark nighttime. I turned towards it and noticed it as it grew bigger, connected to a hushing, slow moving figure. I smelt smoke. The smell of the case under my bed and the furious scrubbing with soap to extract the tar odor. The smell of my habits and my angers. But then, the smell of a woman. It was the smell of Joy, and I could see her white teeth as she neared toward me.

“Late night for the poet?” she said pointing to my worn out notebook.

“Not much of a poet tonight.”

“It’s late. Don’t you have to go home to mommy?”

“No, Mommy’s dreaming. No need.”

           She sat next to me in the adjacent Adirondack chair. Sifting her hands through her pocket, then pointing one to me as she offered: “Want one?”

           I had quit for a few months, but I was weak in the knees. “Yes.”

“What are you doing out here so late?”

“Just got off dinner service.”

“And?”

“And it was terrible. Nothing new. It’s a job.”

“Any racist comments this time?” I took a slow drag and then closed my eyes.

“Just two . . . Not bad.”

“How can you deal with it? I mean, you’re not only in America, already a racist shithole, but you’re in the last remaining ‘whites only’ country club?”

“Ehhh. I went to a catholic school back home. The girls I grew up with hated me for it. Thought I was too good for everyone. And I always liked reading more than dancing . . . I guess I’m used to being strange.”

“An outsider.”

“You too probably. Always an outcast.”

“Hah!” I laughed pompously and then took another swaggering hit. “You saw my mother!”

“A mother is a mother no matter what. Even if she’s just a woman.”

“”Easy to say.”

“No . . . Everybody hurts. Even the rich bitches I serve dacharies to, and sit on these fucking chairs. They hurt. Everybody hurts.”

“I guess.”

“Joe -”

“Jospeh.”

“Joseph”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let yourself suffer too much. Okay? I know suffering. And I’m not trying to sound all cliché third world romantic with you, but you can martyr yourself or learn to live. Don't crucify yourself. I have the scars to prove that it’s never worth it.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I’m a woman . . . ” She took another, solemn drag, “A woman knows everything.”

           I turned towards her and kissed her. I could taste the tobacco dancing in our mouths, and I thought she was so beautiful yet so wise, and I never thought that that could exist. But it did. And it was her.

           And we layed out on the grass, and our clothes got all soggy and wet in the our tumble towards earth. The night mist, and the sea breeze. The moon watching us, mourning. And as we fell and fell, over and over again, I saw the pale silhouette of the Adirondack chair. And though the light was dim, I could see the cracks. How the paint chipped in the wind. And how its form crumbled from time. And how even the nails dug into its foundation were rusted in dejection. And that’s when I knew how they must weep under the weight of those women and men, with the whole world on their shoulders. The summer like a pressure cooker, and the distant scream of time and life almost audible through the fence around our lives. And we fell and we fell, until we screamed. Until we died newly awoken.

 The light in mother’s room was on, and the warm heat of her worry greeted me with a slow and dancing embrace. My father had left already, pursuing his victories in an airport terminal, and through the dim light of our room, I could see her cracks and the sky blues, sunshine yellows and cherry-pop reds of her medicine drawer strewn about the floor like marbles. And I could see her tears. And I could see that she was beautiful once, and maybe even is now.

“Where were you?” she begged.

           And all I could mutter was, “The Adirondacks,””

           And all I could think about was how we were in a world filled with fragile people that say and do fragile things. And Joy. A single totem in the waving sea.

 A poem!

[lifeasarandomdudeknowsit-blog]

Entry #356 - Taboo

Some days, you just can't seem to find the time to do what you want to do and end up doing everything you need to do.  Not exactly my ideal day, but things had to be done that prevented me from recording anything.  So I may end up recording the podcast tomorrow.  Or I may have to wait until the weekend, because the way things are moving right now, I'm not sure I'll be able to concentrate for an hour or so straight in order to record the damn thing.  I have things to take care of tomorrow, things to take care of a couple of days later, and just generally speaking, my brain is scattered all over the place right now.  So I'm not particularly in the best of sorts, and, at least for the first episode of the podcast, I don't want to be all down in the dumps for the recording, even if I am going to talk about something I really enjoy.  Which reminds me, in addition to recording the podcast, it would seem, at least for the moment, that I'm going to have to write and record my own theme song as well.  I was hoping to hear back from a friend regarding an intro, but I haven't heard back, and I would rather have these things relatively in the can before I really get going.

I don't normally like to discuss politics on the internet, because there is the potential for lighting a fire that cannot be controlled, but I really must say that this past week's episode of Saturday Night live featured two of the best sketches I've seen on there possibly ever.  Alec Baldwin continues to prove how fantastic he is at parodying the (as Greg Proops calls him) Orange Julius Caesar.  And, in a sketch of pure brilliance, Melissa McCarthy portrayed press secretary Sean Spicer in a way that no one else could do.  It must be seen to be believed.  I've never really seen much of her work, but I do believe I'm going to have to seek it out now, because that was easily one of the best one-off performances in SNL history.

That episode also showcased the acting chops of Kristin Stewart, who (unfortunately) is best known for playing a dead-eyed character in the Twilight series of films.  I've heard from other sources that she's actually quite a good actress, but again, I never really bothered to seek out her work.  That episode of SNL was actually very good overall, with Stewart showing quite a lot of range.  I was really impressed with her performance. And her apparent little language flub right at the end of the monologue made her seem much more human and relatable than a lot of actors out there.  She just seemed very charming and down-to-earth about the whole experience, and I can appreciate that in a celebrity.

Contrast that with the last episode of SNL I watched (part of, to be honest) that featured John Cena.  I'll admit that I mostly watched that episode because he was the host, but, unlike the Stewart episode, Cena was pretty disappointing in his performances.  I watched about two thirds of the episode, and from what I remember, he played a football player in two separate sketches, a hunky host of a dating show, and in the only bit of range he showed, a police chief in a pre-recorded sketch that was very one-note.  From what I've heard about the show, the hosts have final say in what sketches make it to air, but one has to wonder why Cena chose such bland characters and sketches.  I mean I know he has a particular image to keep up, but still, his choices felt far less interesting than his performances on WWE television, and that just seemed weird to me.  But it isn't as though I can (or want to) do about it.  It's in the past, and that's that.

I'm kind of glad this entry is nearing completion, because I don't really feel like writing today.  I'm basically forcing myself to do this now because I know I won't bother doing it later.  Had I the chance to write this earlier in the day, I don't know if I would have simply because of where my brain is at at the moment.  I really wish I could figure out WHY my brain is acting so weird lately.  Maybe it's the constant changing of sleeping hours or a change in diet (I've recently switched from having homemade McMuffins to cereal, and don't really have a set food plan on any given day) that's throwing things off.  When I had a more consistent daily plan, I'm fairly certain my body and mind worked a lot better than they do right now.  But then again, maybe I'm deluding myself into thinking that was the case.  Either way, I know that something has to change, and it has to change soon, or else I'm going to go crazy.

Well...crazier.

I feel like I don't have much motivation, and that is a frightening thought.  I need to keep things moving forward, or I will end up back in the pits, something I've been trying to avoid for months (and, more accurately, for my entire life).  I don't think I have clinical depression, but there are definitely times when I feel like I might be.  It just might not be consistent enough to be considered depression.  And I'm not looking for a solution like medicine.  But I do think that there might be a few other solutions that I would like to be able to try, but at the moment, I know I can't because if I dive back into those solutions, I may not be able to pull myself out of a different pit.  And that is frightening on an entirely different level.

I'm going to wrap this entry up quickly, because I don't like where it is heading.  This yearlong project is coming to a close soon, and I hope it will take a more positive upswing over the next few days.  We shall see.

#one thousand words every day #writing #life #mentally scattered #saturday night live