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extravalgant · 3 years

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the seven main schools (+ astral & shadow) as flowers

NOTE: i did not dive too deep into researching for this and most of the information i got for this post i got from this site . please dont come after me if i get a meaning wrong IM TRYING MY BEST!!! moving on

this is going to be a LONG POST so sit tight

myth - clematis (also known as traveller’s joy, old man’s beard)

i chose clematis mainly for its meaning: representing artifice, ingenuity and mental beauty. i think part of being a conjurer means that the world is only as big as you make it, and part of it is utilizing your imagination to its fullest extent. mental beauty and ingenuity go hand in hand with being creative, but artifice, in this flower symbolism, means to be cunning or be deceitful. i also think this comes from cyrus drake also being your teacher, which means he would teach in a style that would want you to exploit the weaknesses of the creatures that you summon (that being, calling their true name) in order for them to do your bidding.

“Myth dwells between Fire and Ice, for that is where the shadows lie, and Myths are the shadowy forms of thought made real.”

storm - gladiolus (also known as a sword lily)

urgh.... storm was such a hard school to choose a flower for @_@ according to the wizard101 site storm is also based on creativity, but since we already had that sort of meaning attached to myth, i decided to go with the next best thing which is that gladiolus represents strength, strong character, honor and moral integrity. i feel like it’s pretty well known fact that storm is a hitting school, and a pretty well known one at that - their reputation as a power school is pervasive through all wizarding circles. i feel like this is also where a diviner’s sense of pride comes from - being able to one-hit ko enemies and brandish your power proudly.

amazingly enough, the wizard101 site also addresses this, saying that, “the Storm School will train its student wizards to do a lot of damage. Storm Wizards have the ability to unleash high amounts of damage from an early level, which is good, but they place too much emphasis on power, and therefore suffer in terms of accuracy.”

placing too much emphasis on power... very interesting indeed

death - papaver (poppy)

death was ALSO a super hard school to pick a flower for. i debated between the dracula, the poppy, and the spider lily before deciding to settle with the poppy. I chose poppies in particular because “Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular.” source

I FEEL AS IF THE SPIDER LILY WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO EASY OF A CHOICE but i wanted to encompass all the meanings that death has and has been associated with. some people associate death with peace (at being in a “”better place””), and some people sometimes to describe it as “sleeping” to a younger audience with no death awareness. also heres a nice little excerpt from the w101 site: “Death is about ending and closure. All things pass eventually, and time cannot be held back forever. Wizards devoted to Death Magic, known as Necromancers, understand this fact about everything around them and strive to face it without fear.”

ice - magnolia

as soon as i saw this flower and its description it was PERFECT for ice. magnolias represent longevity and perseverance, due to the fact that magnolias are believed to have existed even at the beginning of time. the ice schools main theme is about persistance - which is to say, that if you’re patient and determined, you will collect the fruits of your labor in the end.

the school page even says this, noting that “The Ice School will train its student wizards to take high amounts of damage and survive.” To thaumaturges, it is simply about surviving to see the end of the battle, and that’s what their play style involves. both magnolias and thaumaturges have that in common : persist and survive.

fire - ixora (also known as jungle flame, flame of the woods)

it was also hard choosing a plant for fire, seeing as so many plants can be described as “passionate” in a symbolic sense. it was between this and orange tulips, but i felt that both the names “jungle flame” and “flame of the woods” both fit fire’s theme. that being said, ixora’s represent passion - the core of fire’s development and description. it is the “bright, burning flame of raw emotion sweeping over everything.” (w101)

fire wizards mainly utilize damage over time spells, which reminds me that a frog boiling in a pot will leap immediately out of the water if its too hot, but will stay until it dies if the water’s temperature reaches steadily. while fire’s general message are that it may consume everything it touches, and how pyromancers are quick to anger and tempestuous, fire plays the longer game by slow roasting their enemies until it is too late for them.

balance - cosmos

when i saw this flower and its meanings there was literally no chance any other flower could compare omg

balance is described as finding the equality of everything and harmony. they are described as broad-minded, taught to be considerate of all things, as well as their own place in the world they live in. cosmos, in this case, represent order, peace, modesty and harmony -- all things which are important to a balance wizard. balance thrives in the company of others, simply because it was made in mind to help others in the heat of battle. “The Balance School will train its student wizards to be effective in group play.” (w101)

however as a result, they may appear as stand-offish and impassive, unable to choose a side or make a choice. such is life when you’re raised to consider all factors of every choice you make - every decision feels heavy.

life - achillea (also known as yarrow)

named after the greek hero achilles, legends would say that his soldiers would treat their wounds with this. source

i chose achillea for life simply for the fact that it represents healing and protection, as well as it being used it being a versatile plant used to treat a variety of maladies or sicknesses - it’s been used as a medicinal plant for a long time across the world.

life embodies “the spirit, the force of awareness and existence. It is about constant growth and movement.” (w101). theurgists are described as having simple pleasures in life, in revelling in the idea of the living, breathing, planet around you. it utilizes the song of creation, using it to weave life where there was none previously. it definitely has powerful roots in the canon storyline - i just wish it was utilized more through its play style.

(astral) star - aster (also known as starwort, frost flower)

ok i dont have a deep meaning for this im sorry . i mainly chose aster simply because “aster” is derived from the Greek word “astron”, which means “star”, and because of the shape of its flowers. pretty simple reason but ill try my best to do it justice

however, aster is represented by patience and elegance -- star magic may be a lesser form of sun magic, simply because it is meant to power yourself rather than your spells. i think theres something inherently elegant about an aura wrapping itself around your figure, bending to the whim of your spells, as it both enhances your health or your spells.

(astral) sun - datura (also known as devil’s trumpet)

Datura symbolizes power and caution. It is a powerful and deadly plant, but also a major religious and cultural symbol.

i chose datura’s for sun because sun is all about power -- datura is highly poisonous and very dangerous to be around. the main deal of the sun school is that they use spells to make their own stronger - it has the “power to endure, power to persevere, and power to change”. we don’t get much of a canon explanation for how sun magic works outside of battles, but i imagine that you have to be careful with sun magic, because as we know - absolute power corrupts absolutely. aint that neat

(astral) moon - protea

protea’s represent ingenuity, diversity, transformation and courage. a big part of moon magic is that it is all about change. changing your spells, your body, your thoughts -- it is symbolized by the moon because it goes through many changes (the tides, the phases of the moon, etc).

i feel as if moon magic might be one of the harder magics to master out of all the astral schools - the transformation into something else may not come as easy as star auras, or that it simply may be too hard on the caster in question, having to change their physical appearances and battle tactics to fit into a new one.

shadow - rhododendron

rhododendron’s represent temptation, caution and danger.

despite how pretty it looks, the stems, leaves, and flowers can be poisonous to humans and pets if ingested. i feel as if that describes shadow perfectly -- the pleasant sight of these pretty flowers is enough to entice a person (wizard) forward, but you must be careful with how you handle this plant, or else you will end up facing dire consequences. (backlash)

shadow magic as a whole can be very tempting to those who seek it -- offering power that scales above others. but it is an advanced magic, and those who seek to play with it often end up paying the price with their lives (in this case, morganthe was crushed underneath the weight of power that shadow gave her). shadow can give you an upper hand, however, if used right -- and the wizard, for the most part, is using it right.

shadow is mainly a cautionary tale of not playing with higher, advanced, magics with the wrong intentions.

#wizard101 #w101 #girl how do i even tag this #i just like to play around with meta xd #also these are just some of my opinions please dont come at me #however if you disagree id love to see a post or explanation in the comments >:333 #i simply love... flower language and assigning symbolic meanings to plants and flowers #this took so long to type up . please look at it . the fruits of my labors #long post #LETS HOPE I DIDNT FORGET A SCHOOL OMG #if someone already did a post like this i will die straight up

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angelictaehyun · 4 years

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𝐆𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐓

“Hey, I think you just passed the exit for the restaurant,” you observed as Taehyun continued driving on the rocky, unpaved backroad. He smiled coyly, gripping his steering wheel, “We’re going to make a little stop, real quick. It’ll just be a second, pinky promise.”

You eyed him suspiciously and glanced around the familiar, harrowing scenery before it clicked.

“No! No! Turn this car around, right now. I don’t want to be dragged into another stupid, idiotic ghostbusting escapade! I still have dirt in my hair from last time. Not to mention, I’m starving!” He clicked his tongue in response, but made no effort to head back toward the main road. You calculated your chance of survival if you jumped out of the moving car, but it didn��t look promising. You sighed, “You know, Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again, expecting a different result.”

“Yeah, screw Einstein, he doesn’t know me. Sure, I haven’t had the best luck in the past, but I’m going to catch a ghost this time, I know it!” he proclaimed, pulling into the creepy graveyard.

You snorted. That’s what he said every time.

The cemetery seemed eerie, sinister, making a shiver run down your spine. He, however, seemed eager as he pulled out his ghostbusting paraphernalia, forcing a groan out of you. He handed you a knife and a small, conspicuous jar of holy water. He slung an old, garlic necklace around his neck and placed a camera around his forehead. You raised an eyebrow, “Garlic? We’re hunting a ghost, not Dracula.”

He ignored you, choosing to hike toward an old, worn crypt stationed in the middle of the cemetery. You stuck closely behind, hating every second. Never in your life, did you think you’d fall for your stupid, ghostbuster best friend. However, there you were, following him into a creepy, dark mausoleum because, for some unknown reason, you were hopelessly in love. He dug a candelabra out of his bag and lit it, allowing a semblance of clarity in the dusty, moldy crypt.

“Someone sent Kai intel on a sighting here and he asked us to check it out, you know, since he’s scared to do it himself,” he explained. It made sense. Kai, a close friend and supernatural enthusiast, had Taehyun hooked on ghostbusting... he provided information and Taehyun investigated. He powered on his handy, equipped camera, excitedly surveying the crypt for any sign of a magical, extramundane being. You, on the other hand, shone a flashlight around the space, disgusted by the obvious lack of maintenance. It also reeked heavily of death.

“Pspsps, ghosty...” he whispered.

You didn’t necessarily believe in anything supernatural, in fact, you just played along on his expeditions. You snickered, “This is stupid. A ghost isn’t going to respond to your... ghostly mating call. Maybe you should ask it a question. They yearn to be understood, too.”

He clearly didn’t quite catch on to your obvious sarcasm as he hummed understandingly, “Hey, ghost. Do you believe in love? Please give us a sign if yes.”

You narrowed your eyes. “I— That’s... not what I meant... but you do you.”

Suddenly, your flashlight died. He shrieked. For a self-proclaimed ghostbuster, he definitely couldn’t handle a scare. However, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t slightly frightened. He mumbled incoherently, but you swore you heard him reciting a Latin incantation. He suddenly looked at you, serious gaze piercing you, "Since we’re going to die, I need to tell you something... I think I’m falling in love with you and I’m terrified.” He let out a deep sigh of relief, “Nice, that felt good to get off my chest. It’s been eating me up inside.”

Your heart filled with joy, and fear, as a candle blew out. You shook your head confusedly, “Wait, woah, backtrack. You said you’re scared of falling in love with me...”

He shook his head, “No, I said I’m in love with you, and I’m terrified. There’s a chance a ghost might follow us home. Or we’ll die here.”

You pressed a gentle kiss to his cheek, making him blush. You didn’t plan on confessing to him in a graveyard, next to an encapsulated corpse, during a paranormal expedition... “Oh, Taehyun. I fell for you a long time ago, it’s about time you caught up. And we’re not going to die here, let’s just go.”

He smiled, every inkling of fear escaping his body. You circled an arm around his waist and placed a soft, loving kiss on his lips. Had it not been for your fear of imminent death, you would’ve stayed like that. Plus... his garlic necklace stunk. He pushed a strand of hair behind your ear, “I guess you’re my ghostbuster partner, for real.”

“That’s... definitely one way to say we’re dating.”

“Hm, dating... I like that,” he whispered. He slipped his hand into your own and sighed, “I don’t think I’ll catch a ghost today.”

“No, baby. I don’t think so, either.” You planted a kiss on his nose as comfort.

You certainly didn’t think you’d leave a graveyard with a boyfriend, but as you walked hand-in-hand, you couldn’t have been happier. As you climbed into his car, a chill gust of wind kissed your skin and the hair on the back of your neck stood tall. An uneasy feeling encompassed you, and you couldn’t help but feel as if someone, or something, was watching you.

#txt x reader #txt imagines #txt scenarios #taehyun x reader #taehyun imagines #taehyun scenarios #taehyun #kang taehyun #tomorrow x together #u thknk it’ll work fhis time i rly hope so

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sweetaesuga · 4 years

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rather be | jhs

pairing: hoseok x female reader

genre: angst, fluff, established relationship au!

warnings: age gap, language, parents disapproval.

word count: 2.1k

↳a/n: decided to post this since my jk fic is taking too long. this is a drabble for my upcoming jhs fic!

"I think they're going to hate me."

"They're going to love you, I don't know what you're talking about."

You shuffled awkwardly in front of the red door, black heels grazing on the cement. "I feel like I'm gonna make myself look like a complete fool," you whined to him, puffs of air are seen leaving you mouth due to the coldness.

Hoseok chuckled. "As if you already don't already do that," his smile surfaced as he remembered the first date you both went on and how timid you were. You could barely stand on your two legs like a baby giraffe that day but now you're glaring at him with your might. "I'm joking babe. They're going to—"

The door is thrown wide open, hitting the wall. Hoseok's mother stood there in her elegant black pencil skirt with a precious diamond necklace, hanging down her neck and matching earrings. Her eyes landed on Hoseok and she embraced him. Accompanied by a kiss on the cheek, she told him how much she missed him. He whined and promised her he would visit more often. Hoseok moved out of the way to make sure she got a good glimpse of you. She scanned you up and down, watching you gulp in uneasiness. Hoseok coughed to get his mother's eyes to return to him when he realized she was staring too long. She smiled at him, cheeks scrunching up. "Um, mom this is Y/N, my girlfriend."

Taking a deep breath, you prepare to greet her. "Hello," her hand stuck out in front you, a nice red color painted onto them.

"Hi!" you shook her hand, your glittery nails are now the center of attention as she glanced at them. "It's so nice to meet you!"

Your cheeks flushed at your ear-piercing tone. Hoseok's mother seemed a little taken back but veiled it with a small smile, not the same she gave your boyfriend however. "Hoseok talks a lot about you, we're so happy to meet you."

She stepped aside, making way for the two of you. Shutting the door in front of you, she walked over to the living room. "I'm sorry but Jiwoo won't be joining us today, she's busy at work like always," she mumbled the last part. You nodded, secretly a little grateful that his sister wouldn’t be here because the information eased your nervousness.

Hoseok wrapped your hand around his, reassuring you to just be yourself. He gave you multiple talks along the way, reminding you that if his parents would approve of a beautiful amazing girl like you, his words exactly.

His father appeared from the kitchen, waving slightly at you. His attire was the same as his wife, elegant and classy. A dark suit with a simple navy tie and a white button down shirt. “You're back from Seoul! And you even brought yourself a pretty lady," Hoseok's father grinned at you and went in for a hug. Your cheeks flushed even more at his comment, taking a whiff of his dark spiced cologne.

"Dad, this is Y/N, my girlfriend," his father whistled at him, happy that his son has finally found himself a girlfriend.

"Thank god! Was beginning to think you were gay or something," you can't help but let out a snort, Hoseok's glare quickly shushed you. "Seriously, he never brings over a girl. I mean, Hoseok you're thirty-three and haven't even thought of marriage!" you laughed in agreement and your boyfriend grimaced at the thought.

His father warmed up to you fast, walking over to the dinner where everything was prepared waiting for you. His parents sat across from the both of you, his mother chose to sit in front of you. The warm dish of jajangmyeon planted in front of you.

"Wow," the air in your lungs are knocked out from the delicious plate in front of you. "This looks amazing and I bet it'll even taste amazing."

His mother scoffed. "We didn't cook it, the maids did."

Hoseok distinguished the tone his mother was using on you, remembering it from the times her and his father fought. She had an attitude towards you. His hands enclosed around you, kneading your knuckles. You blinked, surprised at the fact they had maids but still apologized for assuming.

"Is this the house where you grew up?" you voiced to Hoseok, genuinely interested if he grew up in this lovely home.

His father slurped down his noodles, prepared to answer the question for him. "No, we moved like three times. He grew up in another house that we sold. It was a great house, just didn't feel right for us."

Nodding, you gazed around the dining room. White coated on the walls with a brown marble floor that evened the colors out. Instead of a source of light hanging from above, there was two plants hanged. The dining table was a weirdly shaped wooden plank on four poles that still added touch to the design. "This is very beautiful," you complimented, fully absorbed in the modern design.

"I designed it myself," his mother smiled in pride and stared up at the plants. His father grinned at her, reminding her how much of a great job she did. "I went through a lot of designs but I definitely had a thing for modern interiors."

"Seriously, I remember when everything was dark. It looked like Dracula's house, Y/N," Hoseok recalled, receiving a frown from his mother. Your lips curved upwards but tried to hold your laugh in. "It was black and red in here, you should've seen!"

His father laughed at him. "You think that was funny?" he challenged his son with raised eyebrows. Hoseok stopped eating his noodles to stare at him along with puppy eyes. "You should of seen what Hobi used to play with as a kid that now he's ashamed of."

On cue, Hoseok's eyes widened at the sudden memory his father was going to expose. You gave him a puzzled look. "What is it?"

"No dad, stop! That was um....when I was younger. You said you weren't gonna talk about this!" Hoseok reminded him, it only gets your curiosity to leap higher.

"What is it?" you asked, leaning forward. Hoseok's father glanced over at him, staring into his sunken eyes that lost hope.

"He used to play with a barbie when he was younger—which there's nothing wrong with that but Hoseok over here gets embarrassed about it all the time, it's too damn funny!" his wife laughed along with him.

You giggled and turned. Surely enough, your boyfriend was sitting uncomfortably in his seat with red flushed cheeks. He wore a grumpy frown on his lips. "There's nothing to be embarrassed about, Hobi." you teased him, pinching the cheek closest to you.

"So where do you come from?" his father started again once he calmed down, bringing a piece of noodles to his lips. His wife sat besides him, peacefully eating her portion.

"I originally come from Ulsan but I came to Seoul because I'm currently attending Hanyang University right now."

The table goes quiet and you're worried that you might've said something wrong. You went over your words in your head, trying to find what could've offended them. Hoseok's father stopped chewing for a moment as if he's processing what you just said to him. Hoseok sighed and grabbed your hand from under the table, not helping your anxious state.

Maybe it was the university you were attending? You couldn’t think of anything else besides that being the reason that caused the tension in the room.

"How old are you?" his eyes fixed on you, wandering of your features to try to determine the answer himself.

"Nineteen."

Hoseok's mother laughed, earning a scowl from Hoseok himself. She shook her head and drank her wine, telling herself things under her breath. "Oh my god you stupid girl, you really thought you could date my son just for his money."

A frown settled on your face. Your palms began to become sweaty. Hoseok's eyebrows furrowed, his jaw continually clenching and unclenching. "I'm sorry? I don't know where you guys got that idea." you laughed awkwardly but shut your mouth when his father sent you a glare. It's almost like his whole personality switched into an asshole.

Hoseok doesn't move his hand even when his father glared at him. "We're not dumb sweetheart. Little girls like you that can't afford college, of course you would be looking for a sugar daddy," his mother continued. She aimed her finger at Hoseok. "And you, you're smart enough to know this. And getting a girl like this? Hoseok, I thought we raised you better than that." she turned to you, her gaze piercing through you you're sure it left a two holes in your head. "He's supposed to be getting married by now but instead he's wasting his time with someone like you."

You bit your lip, unable to blink or else a tear will rush out. There's a huge pressure on your body right now as you try to compose yourself together and not cry in front of his parents, but with the sickening look his mother is giving it's hard to follow through.

"What is your guy's problems?" Hoseok's voice cuts in. His chair scratched the floor as he stood up in front of them. His hands clutched yours tightly, even when you tried to pull away. "Sugar daddy? Are you listening to yourself right now?!" his voice boomed throughout the room.

"Hoseok—" you're ready to stop him from defending you but he's quick to silence you.

"I know Y/N, she's not like that," his eyes searched for you glossy ones. You sniffed and peered up at him. "You guys just barely met her, you can't make those assumptions of her. I know she's not with me for money, hell she won't take that necklace I bought her," you faintly smile at the memory of Hoseok begging you to take the emerald stone necklace in the middle of a restaurant. You kept refusing however not wanting to wear that expensive jewelry around since you feared that it wouldn’t look good on you.

"Hoseok please, a much younger girl wanting a rich man like you? She's like ten years younger than you! You think she's ready to get married anytime soon?" his hands kneaded your sweaty palm. "You're thirty-three and she's nineteen! You both are at different points of your life, she probably just came out of the nest. This is not going to work out," his mother stressed, standing up from her seat. His father exhaled and laid back in his seat. "How much?" she asked all of the sudden.

"What?"

"How much to get you out of his life? Name the price and you'll leave him alone."

"Mom! What the hell?!" Hoseok embraced you when you let a sob escape your mouth. Your nose nuzzled in his chest, taking in his coconut body wash. "I can't believe you guys would go this low!" you never heard Hoseok this angry. Even during all those times you messed something up like one of his papers by spilling lemonade onto it, he would never raise his voice. "Y/N makes me happy and if you guys can't accept that, well then—"

"What Hoseok? Are you going to chose her over your own family?" his father finally decided to talk, chest heaving up to present himself as more assertive. You feel backstabbed by this man, a few minutes ago he was telling your stories of Hoseok playing with barbies.

Your boyfriend doesn't say anything to them at first. He solely gazed down at you, pressing his soft lips against your forehead. "Goodbye," he decided, pushing in both of our chairs. You don’t miss the despairing features on his parents face as you exit the house.

Even when you both reach his car, you haven’t stopped crying. He opened the door for you. Your eyes followed him as he walked around to his door. “Maybe your parents are right,” you croaked out, your voice vague from all the tears you’ve poured out. Hoseok stopped to look at you, eyes urging with you to continue. “What if people just see us like that? I’m a fucking gold digger and you’re a sugar daddy. I’m just with you for the money, I don’t want people thinking of me like that,” your voice cracked halfway.

Hoseok reached over the console to wrap his arms around you, giving your forehead a quick peck. “People who think that are just people that don’t know what do with their life and like to get into others’ businesses. I know you’re not a gold digger, Y/N.”

“I feel like such a bad person,” your hair stuck into your forehead as the tears poured out. You hiccuped into Hoseok’s shoulder. “You can’t pick me over your family, we need to break up.”

He shook his head, a tear managing to slip out. “No, I don’t ever want to break up with you. Y/N, I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.” you sniffed and glanced up at him, noticing his eyes and how tears were dangerously close to pouring out. He opened his mouth but shut it. A tear ran down his cheek and near his mouth.

“When I am with you, there’s no place I’d rather be.”

#hoseok imagine #hoseok x you #hoseok x reader #hoseok x y/n #hoseok scenarios #hoseok drabble #hoseok angst #hoseok fluff #j hope x reader #j hope imagine #j hope scenarios #j hope drabble #bts drabble #bts fluff #bts angst #jung hoseok drabble

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tvdversefanfiction · 3 years

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Forget me Not

Chapter 2 - Remember My Name

Warnings: I do not own nor do I claim to own any of the material, characters, or storylines from within the TVDverse. I am not making any profit from this, this is purely a passion project, from one to other fans who are willing to read.

15+: May contain moderate to strong language, sexual innuendos, and sexually charged scenes. Moderate to strong descriptions of violence, gore, torture, and practices of witchcraft.

F/F, F/M, M/M, GEN, + OTHER

Chapter 1 Already Gone

So, the plan, if you were wondering, to beat the hollow and reunite the Mikaelson siblings turned out to be painfully simple so painfully simple it should have been our first option but in fairness, one should never cast a spell until they have learned everything about the spell their casting, a lesson I learned many years ago.

Elijah, Klaus, Kol, and Rebekah, reunited with their eldest sibling Freya within the family compound in New Orleans, Elijah's memories now restored making all four of them ready to get rid of the hollow for good and after giving the siblings a few minutes to catch up with each other and share their stories from the past nine years in which they were all apart, the plan was ready to be put into motion.

At first, I was stricken by shock and disbelief as like their brother Elijah, neither Klaus, nor Kol, or Rebekah, seemed to remember anything about me looking at me like a stranger and not somebody who had shared his life with them, it was as if all memory of me had been taken from them or perhaps they had just lived such a long and intriguing life since we had last met that I had been entirely forgotten.

I was all but numb by their forgetfulness even though it did make me more curious that not a single memory of my existence was remembered by any of them, no one's lack of memory hurt me more than Elijah's, I could understand Rebekah and Kol not remembering me, God even Klaus, but not Elijah, not after everything he had done for me.

But I was not there to be reunited with old friends nor was I there to look back on the past, no, I was there to get rid of the hollow and then and only then could I investigate their confusing case of amnesia that seemed to only be related to me.

I had each Mikaelson bring a newbie vampire of their own making, four strangers I did not give much thought, nor did I give a damn about their fates, and I ushered the four Mikaelson's to stand in front of their creations, one by one until there was a line of Elijah, Klaus, Kol, and Rebekah, and a line consisting of the four new-born vampires, and then Freya and myself began the spell to extract the hollow from her siblings, putting into the newbie immortal beings, and then proceeded to kill the four vampires, sacrificing them to eliminate the hollow and reunite the original family.

Yes, those four strangers who I and Freya killed could have been complete innocents or they could have been worse monsters than those I was helping but I did not care, I had lived too long a life to be affected by a stranger's death or to cry about spilled blood. I am far from innocent, and I care for only a few so when that few need me, I would wipe out an entire city to help them out.

After all, humans are born to die whereas creatures like myself were born to live forever.

After the deed was done and the hollow was gone, I took myself to the nearest bar I could find so I could drown my sorrows over being forgotten by the only people in the world I thought truly knew me, the closest bar being Rousseau's.

"What can I get you?" Asked the largely too chipper bartender.

"Vodka," I answered him as I sat down at the bar. "Just leave the bottle."

"I guess it's been one of those days!" He responded as he handed me a bottle of their finest vodka. "It's been one of those days for a lot in this city my friends included but hey we almost got a decade of peace, so I guess chaos was long overdue."

"I did not come here to get to know the bartender." I snapped, making it clear he was not about to make a new friend in me.

"No, you came to help aid the Mikaelson family reunion which will more than likely kickstart another war sooner rather than later." He revealed as I realized this man clearly had an ear to the ground when it came to things that went on in his city. "What I want to know is which Mikaelson made a friend out of you my money is not on Klaus maybe Rebekah definitely not Kol."

"Who remembers?" I mumbled with a sense of bitterness as I took a drink from the bottle of vodka. "You must be one of Marcellus' minions' rumor has it he's not too happy about his beloved Rebekah running back to the family that wronged him so many times."

"You know the Mikaelsons and Marcel? I'm nobody's minion unless they get all murderous then I'm anybody's just to stay alive but I'm sure not playing in their games even if my best friend is now married to Kol." He went on to tell me. "My name is Josh and I know you're like the original heretic or whatever but what is your actual name?"

"So, your best friend must be the harvest girl turned super witch Davina Claire, I have heard of her, just like I have heard of Marcel, but I have never met either. As for the Mikaelsons, it seems they have completely forgotten me." I decided to answer him, not knowing why I was divulging any information for some undead bartender. "My name is Salem Helsing, everybody always knows about the legend of me, but they never get my name right."

"Do not tell me you are related to Van Helsing, the prince of darkness' ultimate nemesis? The guy Wolverine from X-Men played in that movie that was criminally underrated?" He questioned me with a sense of excitement, a sense that I knew all too well whenever anybody heard my last name for the first time.

"Dracula's nothing but a myth, a legend, a story, but Van Helsing, he was my father, is my father," I replied, admitting for the first time in a long time who my father was, as I took a bigger drink from my bottle of vodka.

"The Mikaelsons knew the son of Van Helsing himself and yet they do not remember you? Something tells me your memory was either replaced with something almost as awesome as the heretic son of one of the most famous hunters or some witch probably spelled the memories away." Josh said, his words making more sense than any other words I had heard in days. "Wait, so you are telling me Dracula is not real?"

"The only thing I know that my father hunts is me," I admitted to him. "In my entire existence, I have never once been forgotten, feared, loathed, and despised sure, but never forgotten…"

"And that annoys you more than anything doesn't it? Which one of the Mikaelson's were you in love with? Clearly, you're nursing a broken heart here and you would not be the first in this bar to find themselves in need of a drink after a rendezvous with that family." Josh responded all too correctly for my liking.

"You are smarter than you look, Josh," I replied while attempting to change the subject as I stood up from my chair. "Too friendly for my liking and that quality is definitely going to get you killed but I cannot deny my hope you last at least a century or two."

"So, which one?" He asked again, eager for my answer, one I was not willing to give and so instead I just walked out ready to leave this city for good and never look back but fate itself had other plans for me.

I never got far from that bar before Klaus Mikaelson vamp sped his way in front of me within the streets of New Orleans and I recall briefly hoping that at that moment he had remembered me, that they had all remembered me but of course, it was not his memory that made him seek me out but instead of his curiosity or better put paranoia.

"So, what the hell is this newfound freedom going to cost me?" Klaus asked me abruptly. "And do not say it's free because I have heard of your help, and it always comes at great cost.

"You seriously do not remember me?" I replied in complete disbelief, stunned to think he somehow knew of me yet did not remember me. "Am I the biggest fool to think that maybe just maybe our history together would be remembered even if a few centuries passed? God, I dreaded so much about seeing you again, I thought you would hate me, or I'd hate you, or that the past would just remain in the past, but I never thought for a single moment that you would not even remember me!"

"I think all those years not quite being a witch or a vampire has truly warped your mind because neither myself nor my siblings have any recollection of you, and I'd think I would remember someone like you if we had met," Klaus responded making it clear to me once and for all I had been completely forgotten. "However, crazy, or not you helped reunite me with my family and for that, I am in your debt, so name your price, I could pay for your therapy perhaps?"

"I was simply returning a favor for someone I once thought I knew and either way that favor has been returned so we are done here," I told him as I attempted to hide the hurt within my eyes, the pain on my face, and the fact that his words had just broken my non-beating heart.

"Why does this not feel like it's over?" Klaus asked me, as untrusting as he always was as if I could even answer his question when I was beginning to question everything myself.

Before I could conjure up any words for a response to the original hybrid himself, Elijah sped his way onto the street's vampire style and was now standing side by side with his brother.

"Salem Helsing!" Elijah said, surprising me with his greeting, only to surprise me further when he rushed over to hug me tightly. "I remember you now and I cannot thank you enough for what you have done for me and my family."

As if this visit to New Orleans had not surprised me enough just when I was beginning to accept the fact I was nothing to a family I once loved like my own, just when I was giving up all hope, Elijah had miraculously remembered me, and as he continued to hold me tightly in his arms, I realized I was a fool to ever think I meant nothing, at least to Elijah anyway and his arms I began to break down. I cried with such great relief that Elijah had found me again that I had found him, that we had found each other and after all these years he was back in my life, and now he had returned to me, there was no way in hell I was ever going to lose him again!

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ryttu3k · 3 years

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Doing those ship meme questions only it's the new OT3 (Beckett/Sascha/Ilias) because they're my main source of serotonin these days. Occasional appearances from Anatole and Lucita, too.

Not doing all, but there are A Lot.

1. Who's the one who's reckless and always getting into trouble while the other gotta pull em out

Beckett and Sascha actually do have a lot of braincells between them but none of them are in use for 'can sense danger'. Ilias has gained some minor common sense since his 'hey, I'm going to ask our Antediluvian for power to help face its favourite childe oh whoops I am possessed' thing and is usually the one sighing fondly and saving their asses.

2. Who's the one to send the other "I love my gf/bf" memes

Ilias. 100% Ilias. He would go out in public in a shirt saying 'I <3 Sascha' and calling them ‘my flower’ while Sascha is just pleased they can't blush any more.

3. Who's the one who listens to a music genre the other doesn't like and how does the other react

God their music tastes are all over the place. Sascha is over a thousand years old and has seen and heard A Lot. They consider the Romantic period 'modern music'. Beckett is similar albeit with about 350 years of it. Ilias got hurled from 1233 to 2004 and after a period of ??? went, "Oh, Romanian music!" and it was. Dragostea Din Tei. Like can you imagine one moment it’s 1233 and the next moment you are listening to Dragostea Din Tei. Also thanks to the language drift they only caught about a quarter of the words so it was this whole thing where he almost, almost was understanding it but the rest was just, “...what.” And that’s how Ilias discovered modern music.

Anyway yeah they’ve pretty much decided that their collective music tastes are so disparate no one is allowed to comment on them.

4. Which one spoils the other more and do they ever get competitive to show the other more love

Honestly, they all kind of spoil each other, albeit in different ways. Like Ilias will just randomly pop a handmade flower crown on Sascha’s head. Beckett will occasionally find an extremely rare book on his desk and know Sascha found it for him. Beckett always tells Sascha first when he’s found something cool so they can be the first to investigate it. And they absolutely get competitive, yeah.

5. How many years did it take to get married or was it just not for them

Sascha and Ilias have a mutual blood bond, which is more or less the equivalent of thus. Beckett has a mutual bond with Anatole, but he and Sascha have a level-2 bond.

7. Are their friends/family supportive

Honestly, uh, Sascha and Ilias don’t really have anyone else. Beckett’s companions tend to range from, “They’re terrifying but I trust your judgment :D” (Anatole) to “hahahahahaha if Vykos harms one hair on Beckett’s head I’ll end them” (Lucita) to “WHY” (Aristotle, Okulos, most others tbh).

8. How does one comfort the other when the other is in distress/having a panic attack/crying

Sascha is the one most prone to panic attacks because trauma is a bitch and basically just... Beckett and Ilias both respond by with hugging/gentle restraint (if they’re okay with touch) or by giving them space and doing things like running a hot bath when they’re touch-averse.

9. Which one dissociates

Honestly Sascha spent most of 1234 to 2006 lowkey dissociating, which is fair when there’s literally another essence fused to yours. Post-Dracon, they still get the occasional dissociative episode, but it’s much easier to bring them back to themself.

10. Which one stares at the other's booty like “damn” and how does the other react when catching them

All three tbh. Beckett stares at Sascha, Sascha either gets a bit self-conscious or a bit ;) , depending on mood. Sascha stares at both Beckett and Ilias and gets a bit embarrassed when caught (Beckett will laugh it off, Ilias will basically be ;D). Ilias stares at both and is completely shameless about it because he may no longer be on the Path of Pleasure but he’s absolutely not going to feel ashamed for admiring his gorgeous lovers.

11. When they live together what kinda place do they live in? What does their home look like?

Beckett and Sascha travel too much for one place, honestly, and Ilias accompanies them a lot. They do have a few houses scattered throughout the world, though, including one in the Carpathians (nowhere near Brasov, tyvm). Not really as big as the monastery, it’s mostly like... big library, a few comfortable places to sleep or rest, Ilias likes having a garden these days and grows a lot of flowers.

12. What do their dates look like

Museum heists.

13. How does each act when getting drunk

Ilias gets even more handsy. Actually he can get to be a bit of a pain, but he does listen immediately if one of them tells him to tone it down. Beckett gets very enthusiastic and fired-up and a bit more feral and he’s gonna go find Enoch right now and prove Caine wasn’t real once and for all. Sascha, uh, tends to get a bit emotional and also very talkative, but can literally like. Talk their way into minor breakdowns. Basically less barriers.

14. Which one rolls over in the morning evening to wake up the other one just to kiss them

All three :3

15. Have they saved each other's lives before

Yup!

Ficverse-wise, Sascha did also save Ilias from becoming a bogatyr to the Eldest, although that was also Sascha and Beckett both saving themselves by being emotionally honest. Yeah XD

16. Does one have an interest the other think is weird but wants to listen to it regardless

Ilias’ spirituality conflicts a bit with Beckett’s... atheism, I guess? Like he’s definitely not sure he believes in the spirits that Ilias regularly works with as a Koldun, but he’s willing to keep a relatively open mind. (He’s a bit less open-minded in Sascha’s belief in - and support of - Caine, given that he’s literally based his career around the metaphor theory!)

17. Which one uses cropped hentai as reaction images

Sascha.

They have troll tendencies, okay.

18. Does one of them kinkshame the other

There is absolutely no kinkshaming here. Listen Ilias was a Priest of Jarilo. Sascha was once on the Path of Pleasure too. Beckett seduced Dracula for information then forgot to ask his question. They’re all very open about everything.

There may be teasing about the odd hobby or interest but it’s pretty lighthearted.

19. Is one of them self conscious about their body? If so how does the other comfort them

Beckett occasionally has Moments over his hands and worries about hurting Sascha or something. They basically respond by being like “are you kidding the claws are hot as hell”. On occasion, Beckett will get one of them to Vicissitude them down if he wants to use his hands more, although they’ll regrow and be achey for a night or two afterwards.

20. Say they were cuddling on the bed while listening to record player playing the background. Which song is playing?

Honestly I want to say Third Eye by Florence + the Machine just for fic reasons. When I was writing Mantle I saw it very much as Beckett towards Sascha, but it fits with Ilias towards them as well.

I have no idea how they would have discovered F+tM but anyway.

23. What kinda joyrides do they go on? Relaxing ones or wild ones?

It. I imagine it usually involves police chases. When it doesn’t Beckett will occasionally go wolf so he can stick his head out the car window like :P

Shh don’t tell anyone.

25. Do people ever get annoyed of their pda

God probably. One of the main exceptions is Anatole, who’ll basically go, “Oh! Are we cuddling?” and flop on top of Beckett.

27. Which one’s the red, which one’s the blue

They’re all red. Fear. Ilias is probably closest to blue.

28. Are either of them mentally ill, if so how do they help one another cope

Sascha has both PTSD (from Symeon and Michael, and from the Eldest) and C-PTSD (from being bound to the Dracon for literal centuries). Also depression and anxiety, which are... pretty common with those. See question 8 for some of the coping methods, the rest is just... taking each day as it comes. Like they’ve lived a very long time, but they only got free of the Dracon in 2006, so it’s still a very new thing.

Ilias has some trauma from some of the things he’s had to do to survive since waking up with the Thirst of Ages, and gets into guilt spirals on occasion. He mostly focuses on Path of Nocturnal Redemption methods to work through it; he’s kind of adverse to anyone seeing him vulnerable like that. He knows Sascha has done some awful shit, but they weren’t themself at the time so Ilias feels it doesn’t count, and Beckett is like, Humanity 6? He just doesn’t get it, so Ilias keeps it to himself.

Beckett has an odd, acquired one - his experiences in Jerusalem left him with the ability (if it could be called an ability!) to occasionally hear the Cobweb (the Malkavian Madness Network). While his connection isn’t nearly as strong as an actual Malkavian’s, he does get odd flashes of Insight; less helpfully, it can occasionally get, uh, loud in his head. This tends to ramp up a bit with proximity to Malkavians, so when he’s around Anatole, Anatole will help him filter the voices and thoughts out by teaching him meditation techniques. (Given that Anatole - correctly - feels responsible for Beckett being afflicted thus, he wants to make sure it doesn’t hit his lover too badly.)

29. Does one have a spot on them where they would melt when the other kisses them there

Give Beckett head scritchies and he’ll turn into a puddle :3

34. Are they a reckless couple or safe

*loud, prolonged laughter*

37. Do they get into fights often? If so what do they fight over and how do they make up?

Sascha and Ilias are usually... very chill; if they argue, it’s over the other’s safety, like Ilias wanting to do something reckless and Sascha being very much ‘please do not’. Sascha and Beckett argue a bit more, although thankfully they have now stopped trying to literally kill each other XD When they do, it’s usually ideological, related to Gehenna, Caine, et cetera. Sascha is still very much a part of the Sabbat, and Beckett is, well, basically an atheist.

40. Who would fight in honor for the other if someone would insult them

All three tbh. Here’s a fun bit from the novel:

Still really dig this bit from BJD, too!

No misgendering on Beckett’s watch!

42. How would one react if the other was to die

Uh.

Poorly.

Like most of Sascha’s sanity slippage was due to the Dracon’s essence being fused to their own and just how the Eldest... did that, but a good part of it was absolutely due to Ilias’ death.

43. Who dies first

...canonically, Ilias XD;;

It’s okay he gets better.

#vampire the masquerade #feral nerd #mx meat crimes #tzinnamon roll #caymanshipping #heartflowershipping #ivoryringshipping

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mst3kproject · 4 years

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Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971)

I’ve been meaning to get to this one for a while. It was directed by Al Adamson and stars Lon Chaney Jr. from Indestructible Man in his last and worst film. Also featuring appearances by Greydon Clark (director of Angel’s Revenge), Forest J. Ackerman (the comic book guy from Future War), and Jim Davis (the grandpa from The Day Time Ended, not the guy who invented Garfield), and generally being one of the shoddiest and most confusing movies I’ve ever sat through, it is a mystery to me why Joel chose Carnival Magic and just left Dracula vs Frankenstein sitting there. Maybe it was the widescreen thing.

It’s hard to say what the hell is going on in this movie but I’ll give it a try. Under the cover of a carnival freak show, mad Dr. D’Ray is decapitating nubile young women and then sewing their heads back on, because… uh… because. One night, his work is interrupted by none other than Count Dracula! The Count reveals that he knows D’Ray’s secret – D’Ray is really the last surviving member of the Frankenstein family, and Dracula has recovered the body of the original Frankenstein’s Monster and wants D’Ray to help him bring it to life, because… uh… because. Meanwhile, a woman named Judith Fontaine is looking for her sister, Joannie, who was last seen on the beach near Dr. D’Ray’s Creature Emporium. Judith and her boyfriend Mike eventually find their way into D’Ray’s lair, and the doctor and his various deformed assistants (obviously he has deformed assistants) are all killed as the couple attempt to escape again. What Judith and Mike don’t know is that they’re not safe yet. They still have Dracula to deal with!

That outline actually only represents a fraction of the madness in Dracula vs Frankenstein. There’s a rapey biker gang and a bunch of noticeably over-age hippies who seem to think they’re in a very different movie. There’s D’Ray’s hunchback Groton and his pet puppy, and Grazbo the Angry Midget. There’s the stunningly unhelpful detective who’s supposed to be looking for Joannie. D’Ray brings the Frankenstein Monster back to life with the help of a magical comet. The idea that creatures like Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster actually exist is treated as obvious and commonplace, and the climactic fight between the two is over who gets to feel up Judith. It’s a mess.

The reason Dracula vs Frankenstein is such a mishmash of incongruous ideas, at least according to El Santo of 1000 Misspent Hours, is that Adamson filmed for a while, then ran out of money and had to set the project aside while he raised more. During this intermission, he got a bunch of new ideas, and had to shoehorn them in with what he’d already shot to turn his original sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll film into a monster-versus-monster piece. It should therefore surprise nobody if the results are about as graceful as a giraffe on roller skates.

The two title monsters are astonishingly shitty. Frankenstein’s Monster looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy gone horribly wrong. He looks like his head got stepped on and they couldn’t afford to fix it. The first time you see him, when Dracula digs him out of a cemetery, you can barely tell you’re supposed to be looking at something’s face – it looks like a mass of home-made play-dough that’s been left out in the sun. He has claws for some reason. That sequence of similes still doesn’t do justice to just how absolutely terrible he looks, and yet, shockingly, he’s less stupid than Dracula.

Oh, god, this movie’s Dracula. His face is slathered in Observer makeup (though his hands aren’t, probably because it would have gotten all over everything) and he wears bright red lipstick and fake fangs that don’t allow him to fully close his mouth. His vinyl cape almost definitely came from Party City. His voice echoes like he’s talking into an empty garbage can, even when he’s sitting in the back seat of a car. He has an incredibly funky goatee and a ring that shoots fire. Everything he says and does is deeply, self-consciously dramatic and it all comes to an absurd crescendo in the series of priceless faces he makes as he turns to dust in the sun.

On a scale of absurd theatricality, Dr. D’Ray is only shortly behind him. The mad doctor dresses like Colonel Sanders, has some classic evil facial hair, and spends much of his screen time monologuing… but nothing he says ever makes a lick of sense. The stuff that comes out of his mouth is literally indescribable so I’m going to have to give you some examples:

Rambling in his lab, D’Ray describes his work as follows: “human blood is the essence from which future illusion may be created, but the secret is not to have the blood at rest. No, the circulatory system must experience a traumatic shock, one that is inconceivable to the human mind. The idea of trauma is not a new one, but I am sure I am the first such experimenter to incorporate the horror of an actual decapitation into later rejuvenation of a human body!” This is evidently supposed to be a justification for the sewing-heads-back-on thing – it ‘activates’ the blood and allows D’Ray to make his ‘serum’. He then injects that ‘serum’ into Groton, who transforms into an axe-wielding maniac. Later, Dracula claims that the same ‘serum’ would have made him invincible. I, uh… what?

Sorry, I was talking about D’Ray’s monologuing. When describing his Creature Emporium, D’Ray informs some guests, “the greatest mysteries in the world are not mysteries at all, unless we take time to become familiar with them.” Isn’t that the opposite of how mysteries work? It’s easy to believe in, say, the Loch Ness Monster, until you familiarize yourself with the history of the ‘evidence’ and realize that it’s almost all complete bullshit.

When Dracula shows up, D’Ray declares, “I am too old and too sick to be interested or surprised by anything, but when a man comes into my house and casts no reflection on my mirror, and on his hand wears the unholy crest of Dracula, there is no scientific answer to anything. Now, what is on your mind, Count Dracula?” Honestly, this nonsense is spoken with such conviction that you almost don’t notice that the end of the sentence has nothing to do with the beginning.

The movie has two things that might qualify as a ‘special effect’. One is Dracula’s zappy fire ring. It’s crummy, but you can tell what they’re going for. The other is the ‘comet’ that is instrumental in giving life to the Frankenstein Monster. This is represented by a slow pan past a flickering light bulb against a black background. Even having just heard Dracula talking about the importance of the comet, it took me a minute to figure out what I was supposedly seeing – it’s that bad. This might be halfway forgivable if the comet were somehow important to the plot… if the Monster, for example, had to complete some mission before it sets or something. But it’s totally gratuitous. They could have taken that out, avoided a distractingly awful effect, and made the movie a little bit shorter!

As for meaning anything… Dracula vs Frankenstein does not, and indeed seems to go out of its way to avoid it. The events that unfold are remarkably meaningless. Judith finds her sister Joannie, who is not dead but neither is she alive, and then the story just forgets about Joannie and gives her no resolution. Hippie girl Samantha is saved from being raped by her angry ex and his biker gang, but then she, too, is entirely forgotten. D’Ray and his henchmen die in a series of contrived accidents that serve no purpose but getting them out of the way so that Dracula and the Monster can fight uninterrupted. This is particularly anticlimactic because so far, D’Ray has been presented as our main baddie. Dracula disintegrates Mike with his magic ring and then the movie rushes to its climax without giving either Judith or the audience time to deal with it. Dracula, the movie’s actual main baddie, just turns to dust in the sun.

There are a couple of moments that are probably supposed to be social commentary, but they have nothing to do with the meandering main plot. One is the scene where a hippie guy says to his girlfriend, “let’s get ready for the big protest tonight.” She asks, “what are we protesting this time?” and he shrugs and replies, “I dunno, but I bet it’s fun.” Later we see this protest, which does seem to have a major ‘party’ component and features some very unspecific placards being waved. In another sequence there’s a druggie bar with the walls covered in graffiti that say things like POT and SOCIETY SUCKS.

Boy, I bet Adamson was really proud of sticking it to those angry young people.

Dracula vs Frankenstein is mesmerizingly bad. Usually the best bad movies are the kind where you can follow the story a bit, so you aren’t wasting time wondering what the hell is going on instead of appreciating the nonsense dialogue and unconvincing effects. Dracula vs Frankenstein is a singular exception. You never have any idea what anybody’s doing and yet somehow it doesn’t matter… the movie gives up on making sense very early, and just forges merrily ahead, dragging you along behind it. What’s actually happening never matters enough to distract. I honestly don’t know if this is a point in the movie’s favour or not… but it would have made a hell of an MST3K episode.

#mst3k #reviews #epsiodes that never were #dracula vs frankenstein #tw: rape #all carnival no magic #70s

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oliviastan17 · 4 years

Text

Stuck (1/?)

Warnings: Language, floofy fluff

Length: 4.6k

A/n: There was so much in this dream that was so specific to me so I made it x ofc. My job, my best friend, my tattoo, my first kiss, etc. It starts off slow but keep reading because it does pick up. I’m a little nervous about this one, not gonna lie! Please reblog and leave comments because that makes me smile! DO NOT POST TO ANY OTHER WEBSITE! Gifs are not mine.Smut will come in later chapters (most likely next chapter)!

Remember this dancing for later in the story!

The elevator doors opened on the second floor to reveal a woman wearing navy blue scrubs with long dark brown hair and the greenest eyes Sebastian had ever seen. She gave him a quick smile as she stepped inside. After she saw the ground floor button was already pressed she leaned against the wall and opened the book she was carrying. She doesn’t have her eyes glued on her phone like most people do and he is immediately intrigued. His curiosity intensifies when he sees that he has also read the book in her hands.

The elevator is working fine until it jerks and suddenly comes to a stop. She stumbled back and he reached to place his hand on her back so she wouldn’t fall. She dropped her book to reach out and grab on to his arm out of instinct.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Um…yeah, thanks. We’re not moving anymore, are we?” she said still holding on to his arm.

“I don’t think so,” he said as he pushed a couple of buttons. None of them lit up and the doors stayed closed.

“Shit,” she whispered as she looked at her watch.

“Should I call for help?” he asked pointing to the phone in the elevator.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Sebastian pushed the elevator call button and someone from the hospital’s maintenance staff answered. They informed the two occupants that it could take anywhere from 1-3 hours to be rescued.

“I need to call my charge nurse,” Liv said more to herself than to Sebastian as she took her phone out of her pocket and dialed. “Hey Sam, it’s Liv. I’m stuck in the elevator and they said it could take 1-3 hours for me to get out…No, I’m not kidding…Yeah, I’ll keep you updated…Okay, bye.”

Liv took a deep breath and then sat down.

“Three hours? I really wish I would have brought my lunch today,” Liv said as she smiled and rubbed her stomach. “I’m gonna need you to distract me from my hunger."

"I can do that. I’m Sebastian," he said as he sat down against the opposite wall.

“Liv,” she said as he glanced at her ID badge with her name and RN proudly displayed.

“So did you always want to be a nurse?”

“Well, when I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist but that was going to be hard to do in Arizona you know, so I let go of that dream. Then in college I was just taking like normal pre req’s for pretty much anything and I saw a group of nursing students all hanging out in their scrubs and I thought, ‘Those look so comfortable. I could wear scrubs every day.’ And it turns out I love it so,” she said shrugging her shoulders.

“Wearing scrubs or being a nurse?”

“Both actually,” she said with a smile.

“They do look comfortable. What’s on your socks?”

She lifted her pant leg so he could read the whole quote which was ‘Carpe the fuck out of this diem.’

“Plain socks are just so boring,” she said eyeing his plain black ankle cut socks peaking out of his shoes.

“Yeah, well all my fun ones are in the laundry so…”

“Sure they are,” she said with a laugh and a smile.

"So you lived in Arizona? When did you move here?"

"I was 16. Are you from New York?"

"No, I was born in Romania, moved to Vienna for a little bit and then came here when I was 12."

“That’s so much more classy than Arizona,” she said with a laugh. “Do you still know Romanian or German?”

“Romanian yes, thanks to my mom.”

“Teach me something in Romanian.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “Zambetul tau este frumos.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means your smile is beautiful.”

“Well, thank you but I was thinking more along the lines of something I could say daily,” she replied with a laugh.

“Just thought I’d put that out there,” he said smiling. “What do you want to know?”

“How do you say fuck?”

“La dracu.”

“La dracu?”

He nodded his head yes.

“La dracu, la dracu, la dracu. I’m a strong believer you should know how to curse in more than one language. That way most people won’t know what you said.”

“They probably won’t. It’s not the most common language over here.”

"Do you miss Romania?”

“I don’t really remember what it was like to be honest. I was so young when we left, you know. I went back a few years ago for work and nothing looked familiar. ”

“I've never even been out of the US."

"If you could travel anywhere, where would you want to go?"

"Oh, I don’t know…Australia seems fun. Have you been there?"

"No, I have not. If we ever get out of here we should go," he suggested with a charming smile.

"Just let me know when you're free and I'll request time off.”

He jokingly pulled out his phone and started scrolling, then asked, “How is 2 weeks from today?”

“I need little bit more warning than 2 weeks,” she laughed. “What work sent you back to Romania?"

"I’m an actor and I was there for film festival," he said after taking a deep breath.

"Oh, wow! Been in anything I would have seen?"

"I don’t know. I really haven’t done that much. A few movies, a couple plays."

“Come on. If I looked you up, what would it say was your most successful role?”

“Probably Bucky from the Captain America movies,” he said while he rubbed the stubble on his chin.

“Why are you being so modest? That’s a big deal! Those movies are huge.”

“Yeah, well…..I don’t know,” he said as he shrugged his shoulders and brought his hand up to rub his right eyebrow.

"You know, I took my nephew to see Endgame but I had no idea what was going on. Like people were clapping and cheering and crying. I mean, it was like being at a football game with my family,” she laughed. “Were you in that one?"

He shook his head yes.

"Really?"

"And apparently my performance was memorable," he said as he dramatically wiped away an imaginary tear.

"Oh my god, I'm sorry!” she said bringing her hands up to cover her mouth. “There was so much going on. I barely retained anything!"

"I'm just teasing you. I had a pretty small part. And a wig.”

"Oh, I feel bad now! I’m sure you were great!"

"No, really I'm just kidding. Don't feel bad," he said placing his hand on her outstretched leg for just a second.

"Did you always want to be an actor? Like when you were a kid and stuff?"

"No, I went through an astronaut phase for a while."

“Just a phase?”

“Well, I mean I still think it would be incredible. I think it would be so cool to be up there floating in space and looking down at the earth, you know? Explore places nobody has been before.”

“Serious question,” Liv said and then paused for dramatic effect. “Do you believe in aliens?”

“Absolutely. Do you?”

“100%.”

“There’s no way we are the only living beings in the whole universe, you know?”

“Oh I completely agree,” she said sitting up straighter. “Do you think we are the smartest ones out there or the dumbest ones?”

“Maybe somewhere in the middle. I mean, we’re definitely not the smartest because well, look at the president,” Sebastian said rolling his eyes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get political. That just came out.”

“You shouldn’t apologize for speaking the truth,” she said giving him a smile that stopped his breathing.

Liv’s phone started buzzing on the floor between them and he noticed the caller ID said Hubby.

“You are not going to believe where I am,” she said into the phone.

“You’re stuck in an elevator. They floated me over to cover for you. You okay?”

“Oh, yeah I’m just sitting here with my new friend Sebastian. Talking about aliens.”

“Is he cute?”

“Actually, yeah,” Liv said darting her eyes to Sebastian. “And I think he can hear you because he is blushing now,” she said with a laugh.

“Take a picture and send it to me.”

“No, Alex I’m not going to take a picture.”

“Bitch, I said take a picture!”

“Goodbye Alex,” she said and then hung up the phone.

“Does your husband always call you a bitch?” Sebastian asked confused. “Sorry, I saw the caller ID.”

“He’s my gay/work husband and yes he does. Bitch is a term of endearment to him,” she explained while rolling her eyes.

“He’s a nurse too?”

“Yeah, we went to school together. You know what, he is actually a huge Marvel fan. Shit, I’m sorry but I am going to need a picture after all. I may not know who you are but I can guarantee you he does. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” he said scooting over from the other side of the elevator so their backs were against the same wall. He would take any excuse to get closer to her.

“Okay, ready?” Liv asked shuffling closer and holding her phone up to take a selfie. They took 3 pictures total. One normal, one with funny faces, and one he snapped mid laugh after he picked up her phone when she dropped it. She had accidentally said, “Shit! I mean la dracula! No, wait that doesn’t sound right!”

The last one was his favorite. She had her eyes closed, head tilted slightly down and away from Sebastian with a huge smile while he looked at her with an adoring smile that crinkled his eyes. If someone saw that picture they would assume these two were a couple and hadn’t just met less than 30 minutes ago.

“Here you go,” he asked as he handed the phone back to her.

“Thank you. I’ll send one to him when you are safely away. If I do it now my patients might get abandoned for the second time today.”

“Do you-“

He was cut off by the elevator making a very strange screeching noise followed by a loud bang.

“That’s not super comforting,” Sebastian said looking up at the now blinking lights.

“No, it’s not.”

“Let’s keep the distractions coming,” he suggested.

“Why are you at the hospital? Oh shit, that’s probably too personal. Skip that one. Um…”

“No, it’s okay. I’m just here visiting a friend. He’s going to be fine.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“Hey, I’ve always wondered this. How do you take a blood pressure?”

“Well, you put the cuff on and push the button on the machine,” she answered smiling.

He closed his eyes, tilted his head to the side and smiled. “I meant what are you listening for with the thing?” he said referring to her stethoscope.

“I know, I’m just being a smartass,” she laughed. “You pump the cuff up and watch the gauge while you slowly deflate it. You listen for when you hear the heartbeat and that’s the top number and then the bottom number is when the heartbeat disappears.”

While Liv was talking, she made a few hand gestures and he noticed a tattoo on her right wrist.

“What’s that?”

She pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to reveal an angel made up entirely of delicate swirly lines.

“You have any?” she asked him.

“No. I think I would have a hard time deciding what to get, you know. And didn’t it hurt?”

“It’s not that bad after a night of partying in Las Vegas. Barely felt a thing.”

“That’s another place I have never been to.”

“You’ve never been to Las Vegas? Okay, first we go to Australia, then next is Vegas.”

“Can we go to Japan after? Always wanted to go there too.”

“Oh, yeah! Of course!”

Sebastian wondered why his dates never were as much fun as being stuck in an elevator with her. He could listen to Liv talk endlessly no matter the subject. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to getting out of the elevator and was wondering if he was a bad person for secretly hoping it would take longer than 3 hours for help to arrive. He barely knew her but he was already hooked.

---------

“Okay, I have a question. I’ve seen all these interviews of actors like talking about how weird it is to film kissing or sex scenes. Is it really that weird or do you secretly enjoy it?”

He tilts his head back and laughed.

“No, I wouldn’t say I enjoy them but some are less awkward than others. I kind of compare it to a first kiss. I mean, it can be extremely awkward and uncomfortable and you never know if you are doing it right like the director wants.”

“What was your first kiss like?”

“I’m pretty sure it was bad on my part,” he said with a laugh. “I was maybe 10 or 11. It happened with my neighbor on the way to school and she was a lot older than me.”

“You had game all the way back then? What happened?” Liv asked jokingly.

“I ask myself that all the time,” he said laughing. “What about your first?”

“I was 11 or 12 I think. My crush found a balled up piece of paper my friends and I were playing MASH on and he saw his name in the list of potential spouses. He walked right up to me and asked if I liked him and I said yes and then he kissed me.”

“What’s MASH?”

“You have never played MASH? Mansion, apartment, shack, house?”

“I’ve never even heard of that. What is it?”

“Oh my god, how have you gotten this far in life and never played MASH?” Liv asked as she reached in her pockets and pulled out some paper and her pen. “It’s totally stupid but we’re doing it.”

“It’s not like we don’t have time to kill.”

“Okay, so we need some categories. We need a spouse, occupation, number of kids, pet, where to live,” she said writing the categories down. “And we need 4 for each of these categories. We’ll do mine first so you can see how it’s done. You get to pick two for me for each category but I don’t get to see what you pick so you get to write. That’s how my friends and I did it anyways.”

“Okay,” he said taking the pen from her and ever so lightly brushing his fingers on her skin. “Spouse?”

“I like that guy from The Office. John Krasinski. He seems nice,” she said and then thought for a bit on her second choice while Sebastian wrote in his two picks. “Oh! My girl crush, Kristen Bell.”

“Okay, what about occupation?”

“Professional puppy namer.”

“I think if that were a real job, it would really suit you,” he said smiling.

“And koala wrangler.”

“Practice for when we are in Australia. Good thinking. Number of kids?”

“Eleven and 9.68.”

Sebastian finished writing in his picks and her answers to all the categories. The answers Liv gave him only made her more interesting to him. They were unique and fun, just like her.

“Okay so start drawing a spiral and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

He started to draw and then stopped and counted the amount of lines from the top to the bottom. He went through the all the categories marking out the answer he landed on each time he counted to that number until there was only one left for each category.

“Are you ready?”

“Yaaasss! I’m so ready!”

“Liv, you are a model married to me living in a shack on the moon with our 18 children and our pet alligator.”

“Oh, I love that! I’m a little bummed I’m not a professional puppy namer to be completely honest but I trust the MASH gods.”

“You are too beautiful to not be a model.”

“Look at you,” Liv said as she took the paper and pen he was handing her. “Maybe you didn’t use up all your game on your first kiss after all.”

“Maybe not. Is it working?” he said flashing his charming smile.

“Maybe a little bit. But we need to see who the MASH gods put you with.”

Liv wrote out the same categories for Sebastian and they went through filling each one out.

“Sebastian, are you ready to know your future?”

“I think so.”

“Sebastian you are stripper married to me. We live at the North Pole in a mansion with our 84 children and our pet three-headed lobster.”

“You put down stripper and 84 children?” he asked laughing.

“Yeah, I’m kind of regretting the 84 children. That part really sucks for me. But you must be a really good stripper to provide me and your children a mansion to live in. So thank you.”

“Well, I do what I can, you know?” he said with a little laugh. “It seems like the MASH gods think we should get together.”

“Yeah well they have also thought I should be with Lance Bass and that is obviously not going to happen.”

“You're not going to make this easy for me are you?”

“Where's the fun in making it easy?” she said with a mischievous smile.

He just smiled back at her, licked his lips and nodded his head. He liked a challenge.

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

The next 2 hours consisted of games and Sebastian’s shameless flirting. Conversation came easy and there were no awkward silences. She thought he was funny, extremely charming and handsome. He loved how confident she was and thought she was witty and sexy, even in scrubs. Well especially in scrubs. Liv had stood up at one point to stretch her legs and as she did his eyes went straight to her lower back where he noticed the top of her black lacy underwear peaking out of her low riding scrub bottoms. He only spent 30 minutes thinking about what kind of cut they were. Thirty minutes isn’t a lot of time right?

“Hobbies? What do you like to do?” Liv asked as she drew her line in connect the dots.

“Uh I read a lot, sometimes I write. Uh…go to the gym? Is that a hobby?” he looked up at Liv after his turn.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Um…you know, hang out with friends, make little short movies sometimes. You?”

“I do yoga or I go for a run almost every day. I go to Target at least once a week and just walk around. I don’t care what you say. That is a legitimate hobby.”

“You just walk around?”

“Yeah, and I buy shit I don’t need and will never use.”

“Oh, I do that all the time so add that one on to my list. What else?”

“Uh, I used to dance.”

“Really? Show me some moves.”

“No, not gonna happen,” she said with a small laugh. “I didn’t say I was good! Besides there’s barely enough room to slow dance in here.”

“Well then let’s slow dance,” he said standing up and offering his hand to Liv.

“I’m perfectly content playing connect the dots.”

“Please? Tell you what, we’ll play rock paper scissors. If I win, we are dancing. Two out of three,” he said kneeling down and putting his hands in position to play.

Liv took a deep breath and she placed her fist on the palm of her other hand. First round, rock beats scissors. Sebastian won. Second round, paper beats rock. Liv won. Third round, paper beats rock. Sebastian won.

He stood up, threw both of his arms up in victory and then offered his hand to Liv. She playfully rolled her eyes, then placed her hand in his and let him help her up.

“We need music,” he said pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”

“Here we go,” he said as “Baby Got Back” started playing on his phone.

He started doing a dance move that showed just how much of a dork he was and Liv couldn’t stop herself from laughing.

“I’m kidding,” he said as the song turned off and “All My Life” started playing.

“That’s just on your everyday playlist?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve heard it since my prom actually,” he said wrapping an arm around Liv’s waist and the other out to hold her hand.

“Don’t move,” Liv said as she took his face in her hands and starred the stubble on his chin. “Oh, it’s just the new gray hairs you grew because this song is old as fuck.”

Sebastian tried to hold back a laugh but couldn’t. “You know, if I didn’t find you so incredibly fascinating, I would really be hurt by that comment,” he said faking being offended while he wrapped his arm back around her waist and then started leading the dance.

“I’m kidding!” she promised him while still laughing. “I actually like your gray patch. The whole salt and pepper hair look is sexy.”

He smiled and licked his lips. It was a habit he had that Liv found unbelievably attractive.

“So you think I’m sexy?”

“Not you. Just this little gray area,” she joked pointing to his chin.

“You like me and you know it.”

“So, your prom. Good memory?” she asked changing the subject.

He laughed at her changing the subject then said, “No, not really. I’ll be replacing it with this one,” he said as he spun her.

“What happened?”

“My date ditched me so I was standing there all alone watching everyone else dance.”

“What a bitch!”

“Like I said, I’ll be replacing that memory with this one,” he said looking down at Liv with a smile. “When is the last time you danced with someone?”

“That bad?”

“No, I’m just curious.”

“I think it was probably at my sister’s wedding 2 years ago.”

“Who’d you dance with?”

“One of the groomsmen. I’ll be replacing that memory with this one,” she said looking up at him.

Sebastian smiled and nodded his head. “See? It’s a good thing I’m making you dance then, huh?”

“There may be an upside.”

Sebastian spun Liv again and instead of continuing the dance he decided to dip her. She wasn’t expecting it and the movement made her grip onto him tighter. Their eyes were locked on each other as he brought her back up. He was leading the dance much slower now to the point where they were barely moving. He darted his eyes to her slightly parted lips and back up to her emerald eyes. Sebastian leaned in slowly and very lightly pressed his lips against hers.

The very moment their lips touched was mind-blowing. A blanket of warmth spread over both of them as they melted together. Her hand was gently grazing the back of his neck giving him chills. The rough feeling of his stubble against her face was surprisingly appealing. He was hopelessly addicted now and wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to stop.

Their lips were moving together like they were made for each other. What started off as a soft kiss eventually turned into a hungry kiss. Liv stood up on her tip toes (she was quite a bit shorter than him) desperately wanting to devour all of him. He bent his knees to dip down and tightened his embrace around her waist before lifting her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist immediately, almost as if they had done this exact move before. He took 2 steps forward and that put Liv’s back against the wall.

If it weren’t for the elevator suddenly coming back to life they would probably still be wrapped in each other’s arms. Instead, the kiss came to an end as their lips left each other. With Sebastian still holding Liv up so that she matched his height, they looked at one another and laughed at how their day had taken such a turn when they both stepped into that elevator.

Liv rested her forehead on Sebastian’s shoulder for just a moment before unwrapping her legs around his waist. Moments later the elevator doors opened to a sea of firefighters and maintenance workers.

“Sorry that took so long. You guys okay?”

“Yes, no worries. We’re fine,” Liv said with a smile as she walked past the group.

“All good,” Sebastian offered while following her.

Liv took a few more steps toward the cafeteria and then turned around.

“We should do that again,” he said with a handsome smile. “Well, maybe not the stuck in the elevator part. Can I call you?”

“Sure,” she said returning the smile and taking his phone to put her number in it. When she looked up to hand his phone back to him she saw Alex walking towards her. “I’m so sorry for what is about to happen.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“Liv! You’re out! That fucking took forever!” Alex said as he finished walking towards her. “Is this the cute guy?” he asked as he turned around to face Sebastian.

“You must be Alex,” Sebastian said.

“OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOD! Do you know who you are?” he asked Sebastian. “Liv, do you know who this is? This is the best day ever! Can I just tell you how amazing you are? Fuck you are so beautiful! You broke the elevator with your hotness didn’t you? Can I get a picture? I need a picture. Let’s take a picture.”

Liv was used to the way Alex spoke so fast when he was excited but she was surprised Sebastian was able to catch any of it.

“Yeah, sure.”

Liv took the phone out of Alex’s hands and took a picture for him.

“Oh my god, I’m touching the Winter Soldier,” Alex said while placing his hand on Sebastian’s chest. “It’s like touching a rock. Jesus Christ!”

“Okay, Alex. Let’s leave the poor guy alone,” Liv said as she removed Alex’s hand. “Thanks for distracting me. Is it weird to say I had fun?”

“No, I had a great time. And not just the last part. I liked the whole 3 hours. I’ll call you,” Sebastian said and then offered a handshake to Alex. “Nice to meet you.”

“You can call me too. I’m way more fun than Liv! Any day, anytime! Or we can text!” Alex offered.

“Bye,” Liv said as she pulled Alex away.

“What the fuck just happened? He’s going to call you? What ‘last part’ was he talking about? Did you have sex in the elevator?” he asked way too loudly in a public place.

“Oh my god! Shhhh! No!” she said walking into the cafeteria to quickly get something to eat.

Alex followed her around asking question after question as she walked around the cafeteria. He finally left her to be alone when she was going to take the stairs up to her floor.

Liv was relieved to have a moment alone. She sat down on the stairs and couldn’t stop herself from smiling. She felt giddy, like she was in high school again and her crush just asked her out.

He’s so cute. I can’t even, she thought to herself as she stood up and began climbing the stairs to her floor. I hope he doesn't turn out to be an asshole. Oh god, what am I worrying about? He’s probably not even going to call. Movie stars date movie stars, not nurses.

Just before she reached her floor she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. It was a text message.

Are you free tomorrow night? –Seb

She responded with a simple yes and a kiss emoji.

Can’t wait.

Part 2

Permanent tags (send an ask if you want to be added)

@sideeffectsofyou @thejemersoninferno @vania-marie @sophiesvalkyrie

@swanlakemikey @hm-fck @beaubucky @allsortsofinterests

#Sebastian stan #sebastian stan fanfiction #sebastian stan fluff #sebastian stan x ofc #sebastian stan x reader #sebastian stan x you #sebastian stan fandom #sebastian stan fan fiction

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miss-edith-cushing · 4 years

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Tag people you want to know better / catch up with. I've been tagged by @ashfae and I’m not surprised at all - she probably noticed how much I love tag games; and the second I saw someone on my dash answering those questions I hoped Ashfae will be a dear and will tag me, and of course I wasn’t wrong - so thank you!

Last song: Zbigniew Preisner - Niebo (Sky) - performed by Elżbieta Towarnicka It’s the last piece with lyrics I listened to, so I guess I should choose this one. It’s an aria from Preisner’s ‘De Aegypto’ (called also ‘Egyptian Opera’), which is... I’m not entirely sure what is that - it was a spectacle performed in TV, but I never listened and seen all of it, and I don’t think it’s available in any way, legally or illegaly. You may know Preisner as a composer who created film scores for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s movies, the best known of which are The Three Colours Trylogy (’White’, ‘Blue’ and ‘Red’) and ‘The Double Life of Veronique’. Elżbieta Towarnicka is his probably favourite performer, and you will clearly hear why (she worked with him also on scores for films I just mentioned). The piece itself was inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the lyrics refer to it.

You know what, this is such a beautiful song and lyrics in the comments are not properly translated, so I’ll do it for you:

You are the yesterday,

You are the today,

You are the tomorrow,*

And you have the power to be born for the second time.

You are the divine soul

That created the gods,

You are strong,

Brightness lasts** in your heart.

Let him wander in peace,

Let him cross*** the skies,

Let him worship the brightness,

Let him, let him, let him.

I am the yesterday,

I am the today,

I am the tomorrow

And I have the power to be born for the second time,

For the second time.

* Using one word for naming the days - yesterday, today and tomorrow - sounds kinda dull here, because the language of this song is very formal. Normally when we want to say ‘yesterday’, we say just ‘wczoraj’ instead of ‘dzień wczorajszy’ (day... yesterday-y??? the first word means just ‘day’, the second word is an adjective), and that rather unusual pattern was used here to describe the days. I have no clue if English has any equivalent of that; but I felt giving you this information is important.

** The verb here, ‘trwać’, have many meanings, and one of them is ‘to last’. I’m not sure if that’s perfect word here - maybe I should choose ‘stay’. 'Trwać’ means here that the brightness in his heart will not fade away - it’s so special not because the circumstances are unfavourable for it to exist, but because that described being is a creature with an unique nature that ensures him to keep the brightness in himself.

*** Do you remember that iconic line from ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ with Gary Oldman? ‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you’? This is exactly the meaning. ‘Przemierzać’ means to travel for a very long time and across a huge distance, so the journey feels like it will never end (which doesn’t have to be an unpleasant feeling). It can be a journey repeated routinely on one road (like the sun, or the ship that cruises between two harbors) or a way of roaming through large space in many directions (like a continent or a sea).

Hey, look who started babbling again, how unexpected.

Last movie: At home: ‘Secretary’ (2002). I’ve seen it many years ago and didn’t remember much, and now I liked it a lot. For my film d’auteur class: ‘La Chute de la Maison Usher’ by Jean Epstein. Pure beauty. And I gave in on Thursday and went to IMAX to watch ‘Tenet’. I’m very serious about this whole pandemic business, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna watch this movie for the first time on the screen of my laptop. I’m not entirely sure what happened, this whole wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff was too complicated to understand so quickly, so I’ll definitely watch it again, but it blew me away and that’s exactly what I wished to happen.

Currently Watching: ‘Supernatural’. It’s the last season, five episodes left... Ugh, I’m already getting nervous. And I guess that’s it... I haven’t watched any new show lately, except for miniseries like ‘Des’ (GOSH that was so good). I don’t feel like starting any new shows and when a few months ago I tried to watch ‘Masters of Sex’ I’ve noticed binge-watching makes me very depressed and nervous very easily, so I stopped. I have a few shows I’m planning to watch, but not many, i.e. ‘Killing Eve’, ‘The Terror’ and ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ - the last one mostly because Marcin Dorociński plays in it - this dude should be more famous than Leonardo DiCaprio and win one award after another. If you have HBO GO, ‘Bez tajemnic’ (’Without secrets’), Polish version of ‘In treatment’, should be available there - there are plenty of incredible and legendary actors in this show, but he is the absolute star of it. And for fellow David Tennant’s fans out there: I haven’t watched ‘Spies of Warsaw’ yet, but Dorociński played Antoni Pakulski there and certainly was great too.

Currently Reading: I just started ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante - my therapist says I’m very much like the title character and I’m very curious what does it mean. I have also a few articles about theory of cinema to read for my tomorrow’s course: ‘On the politique des auteurs’ and ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image‘ by André Bazin and ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo’ by Alexandre Astruc. SO damn interesting. And SHIT-TON of books about Medea - I’m writing my master’s thesis about her, but please don’t ask me about it, I’m already panicking.

Currently Craving: A good long sleep that would last for at least eight hours. To feel strong and healthy enough (I’m extremely tired, my back and stomach hurt like hell) so I could be able to clean up a little, wash my woolen sweaters by hand (I’m not throwing them into washing machine, they cost too much to risk any damage), organize my desk and uni notes from last year... I’m in one of those rare, but powerful moods of making lists of things to take care of and just... putting my world in order. And visiting places. And I would gladly just spend nice, simple time with some of my friends - just having fun and talking about important, but not especially painful stuff. I really, really need to meet with Olaf, my best friend from work, and joke with him, and talk with him like a new bi person with an old-timer gay person, and get to know him better.

Anyone surprised my replies are so long? I’m not.

And now the worst, stressful part: tagging. @dearcrowley @heart-blood-death @darkanachronism - but if you’d like to answer those questions and haven’t tag you, feel invited to do it and please tag me so I could see it!

#personal #shit this is a damn long post #i'm almost embarassed about it #almost - because i do a lot of interesting things and i'm not going to bully myself into thinking i shouldn't talk about them

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Public Enemy Solidified Gang Rule Under James Cagney for 90 Years

https://ift.tt/3vfQifQ

William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) turns 90 this weekend. When the film first came out, a theater in Times Square showed it nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The movie marks the true beginning of gangster movies as a genre. Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar may have hit theaters first, but The Public Enemy set the pattern, and James Cagney nailed the patter. Not just the street talk either; he also understood its machine gun delivery. His Tommy Powers is just a hoodlum, never a boss. He is a button man at best, even if he insisted his suits have six buttons.

The Public Enemy character wasn’t even as high up the ladder as Paul Sorvino’s caporegime Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But Cagney secured the turf Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello took a bullet to claim in Little Caesar, and for the rest of his career Cagney never let it go.

Some would argue genre films began in 1931. Besides mob movies, the year introduced the newspaper picture with Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page and John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet; Universal Pictures began an unholy run of horror classics via Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein, with the two turning Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff into household names; and Howard Hawks’ Scarface would land the knockout for the gangster genre, even if it didn’t get released until 1932.

Sadly, the classic “Gangster Film” run only lasted one production season, from 1930 to 1931, and less than 30 films were made during it. Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell started the ball rolling in 1930, when it became a surprise box office hit. It stars Lew Ayres as the top mug, with Cagney as his sidekick. For fans of pre-Code Hollywood, it is highly recommended. It includes a kidnapping scene which results in the death of a kid on the street. Without a speck of blood or any onscreen evidence, it is cinematically shocking in its impact.

Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy earned their street cred, defying the then-toothless 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which preceded the Hays Code. After New York censors cut six scenes from The Public Enemy to clear it for release, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) set further guidelines for the proper cinematic depiction of crime.

Public Enemy director Wellman was an expert in multiple genres. He spit out biting satires like Nothing Sacred (1937) and Roxie Hart (1942), and captured gritty, dark realities in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He won his only Oscar for A Star Is Born (1937). The Public Enemy is the first example of what would be his trademark: stylish cinematography and clever camera-work. The dark suspense he captures is completely different from the look of German expressionism. It captured the overcast shadows of urban reality and would influence the look of later noir films. His main character would inspire generations of actors.

“That’s just like you, Tom Powers. You’re the meanest boy in town.”

Orson Welles lauded James Cagney as “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” Will Rogers said watching Cagney perform was “like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.” The New York City born performer explodes in this movie. Even in black and white, Cagney’s red hair flares through the air like sulfur on a match. It turns out to be a slow burn, which will reach its ultimate climax in 1949’s White Heat. The Public Enemy is loaded with top talent, but you can’t take your eyes off Cagney. Not even for a second. You might miss some tiny detail, like the flash of a grin, a wink, or a barely perceptible glare.

Cagney had a simple rule to acting: All you had to do was to look the other person straight in the eyes and say your lines. “But mean them.” In The Public Enemy, the characters communicate without lines. When Tom and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) sneak a peek into Larry the Limp’s casket, we understand this is the first time the two young thugs lost someone their own age. The scene barely implies how fortunate they are not to be in that box, but their curiosity is as palpable as the loss of their last shred of innocence.

Cagney was originally cast as Matt, and scenes were shot with him in the role. The parts were switched mid-production, but they didn’t reshoot the flashback scenes, making it look like the pair swapped bodies between 1909 and 1915. It’s a shame because Frankie Darro, who plays the young Matt, made a career out of playing baby face Cagney, and later joined the East Side Kids franchise.

Former “Our Gang” actor Frank Coghlan Jr. took on the role of young Tom. He takes the lashes from his cop father’s belt, backtalking him the whole time. Tom Powers is reprehensible. He never says thank you and doesn’t shake hands. He delights in the violence and sadism. Powers doesn’t go into crime because of poverty; he just can’t be contained. Cagney’s mobster mangles, manhandles, maims and murders, and still needs more room in his inseam.

Dames, Molls, and Grapefruits

Besides defying the ban on romanticizing criminals, both The Public Enemy and Little Caesar broke sexual codes. There are explicit signs that Rico Bandello represses his sexuality in Caesar. Scenes between him and his friend Joe, and his gunman Otera, thinly veil homoerotic overtones. Public Enemy’s Powers, by contrast, subtly encourages the gay tailor who is openly hitting on him.

There are strong indications Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) is grooming Tommy and Matt for more than just fenced goods. Look at the way Putty sticks his ass in Powers’ face while he is shooting pool. Putty Nose’s execution at the piano is creepily informed by the unspoken sins between the men. Tommy relishes the kill.

However, Tommy doesn’t relish being manhandled when he’s too drunk to notice. While the gang goes to the mattresses in the movie’s gang war, Tommy is raped by Jane (Mia Marvin), his boss Paddy’s girl. Powers protests the best he can, but the camera angles leave no doubt. Tommy wakes up hungover, horrified, and feeling impotent. Matt, however, has no trouble getting “busy” with his girlfriend Mamie, played by Joan Blondell, in one of the scenes trimmed by the censors. Blondell, Jean Harlow, and Mae Clarke, who plays Tommy’s girlfriend Kitty, represent a glitzy cross-section of white Roaring Twenties glamour. In the opening credits, when Harlow and Blondell smile at the camera, male audience members of the time blushed.

Harlow was Hollywood’s original “Blonde Bombshell,” starring in the movie that coined the term. Her earthy comic performances would make her a major star at MGM, but she was a dud to critics of The Public Enemy. Hers was the only part which was criticized, and the reviewers were brutal, declaring her voice untrained and her presence boring.

Harlow’s greatest asset had to be contained within the Pre-Code era. Straddled with a wordy part as a slumming society dame, she is directed to slow her lines to counter the quick patter of the rest of the cast. Yet Harlow uses that to her benefit in the film’s best moment of sexual innuendo. While telling Tommy about “the men I’ve known,” she pauses, and appears to be calculating them in her head before she says, “And I’ve known dozens of them.” When an evening alone with Tommy is cut short, Gwen’s exasperation over the coitus interruptus is palpable. Members of the Catholic Legion of Decency probably had to go to confession after viewing the film for slicing.

Most people know The Public Enemy for the famous grapefruit scene where Powers pushes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face. “I wish you was a wishing well,” he warns, “so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink ya.” Tommy treats women like property. They are status symbols, the same as clothes or cars. Kitty’s passive-aggressive hints at commitment get on Tom’s nerves. He can only express himself through violence. There are rumors Cagney, who would go on to rough up Virginia Mayo in White Heat and brutalize Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, didn’t warn Clarke he was going to use her face as a juicer. According to the autobiography Cagney by Cagney, Clarke’s ex-husband Lew Brice loved the scene so much he watched it a few times a day, timing his entrance into the theater to catch it and leave.

Both actors have said it was staged as a practical joke to see how the film crew would react. It wasn’t meant to make the final cut. Wellman told TCM he added it because he always wanted to do that to his wife. The writer reportedly wrote the scene as a kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy.

The screenplay was written by Harvey F. Thew. It was based on Beer and Blood by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. The unpublished novel fleshed out press accounts of the bootlegging Northside gang leaders, Charles Dion “Deanie” O’Banion, Earl “Hymie” Weiss, and Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie. Cagney based his Tommy Powers character on O’Banion and Altiere. Edward Woods was doing his take on Weiss. The book reflected the headlines in the Chicago papers, which reported Weiss smashed an omelet into his girlfriend’s face.

Movies

Al Capone: 9 Actors Who Played the Original Scarface

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Key Largo, Lauren Bacall & The Definitive Post-War Film

By David Crow

The Trouble Squad

The Public Enemy borrowed from the day’s headlines in other ways too. Hymie Weiss was assassinated in October 1926. It was the first reported “machine-gun nest” murder. It is recreated in the killing of Matt Doyle. While shooting the sequence, Cagney ducked real machine gun fire to bring authenticity to the scene. Also taken from real life is the fact that after O’Banion was killed in ‘24, Alterie’s first reaction was to do public battle with the killers. This is similar to Tommy’s final shootout at Schemer Burns’ nightclub headquarters.

Leslie Fenton’s dashing mob captain Nails Nathan (“born Samuel”) flashes the greatest grin in mob movie history. He is based on Samuel “Nails” Morton, a member of O’Banion’s mob. Both “Nails” were driven to their coffins the way it is depicted in The Public Enemy. The real Morton died in a riding accident in 1923, and “Two-Gun” Alterie and some of the other gang members went back to the stables, rented the horse which kicked Nails in the head, and shot the animal. Mario Puzo may have been inspired by this scene when he wrote The Godfather. It is not only tie to the Francis Ford Coppola movie. Oranges have as much vitamin C as grapefruits. Another similarity between the two films is the threat of being kidnapped from the hospital by a rival gang.

The Powers brothers’ relationship vaguely echoes the one between war hero Michael and Sonny Corleone, who believes, as his father does, soldiers were “saps” to risk their lives for strangers. Donald Cook, who played Mike Powers, didn’t pull any punches on the set. In the scene where he knocks Tom into the table before going off to war, he really connects. Wellman told Cook to do it without warning so he could get that look of surprise. Cook broke one of Cagney’s teeth, but Cagney stayed in character and finished the scene.

“It is a wicked business.”

After the stock market crash, get-rich-quick schemes seemed the only way through the Great Depression. The gangster was an acceptable headline hero during Prohibition because the law was unpopular with the press. But after 1929, the gangster became the scapegoat villain. The Public Enemy was the ninth highest grossing film of 1931. But the genre lost its appeal after April of that year, as studios pumped out pale imitations and audiences got tired of the saturation, according to the book Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. David Slocum. Religious and civic groups accused Hollywood of romanticizing crime and glamorizing gangsters.

The Public Enemy opens with a dire warning: Don’t be a gangster. Hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld should not be glamorized. The only MPAA rule the film didn’t break was portraying an alliance between organized crime and politics. The studios passed the films off as cautionary tales which were meant to deflate the gangster’s appeal by ridiculing their false heroism.

Through this hand-wringing, however, Cagney turns false heroics on its head with the comic brilliance of a Mack Sennett short. Stuck without a gun, he robs a gun store armed with nothing but moxie. Powers never rises in the organization. He takes orders and whatever the boss says is a good cut, only asking for more money once from Putty Nose. Unlike Rico, who rose to be boss among bosses, Powers has no power to lose. This is just the first gig he landed since he was a regular “ding ding” driving a streetcar, and it connected with audiences like a sock on the button. They identified with the scrappy killer, and it surprised them.

Even Gwen notices Tommy is “very different, and it isn’t only a difference in manner and outward appearances. It’s a difference in basic character.” Strict Freudians might lay this on his mother (Beryl Mercer), the greatest enabler Cagney will see until White Heat. Ma Powers’ little boy is a budding psychopath knocking off half the North Side, but look at the head on his beer. For audiences at the time, Tom was the smiling, fresh-scrubbed face of evil. He is consistently unsympathetic but likable from the moment he hits the opening credits.

Like Malcom McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he is the fiend’s best friend. Even if it is Tommy’s fault his best pal Matt gets killed. While Cagney spent his career ducking his “you dirty, double-crossing, rat” line from Taxi, the actor wasn’t afraid to play one in Powers. He’s not a rat in the sense he’d snitch on anyone. He’s the last of the pack who sticks it out for his pals when his back is up against the wall.

A Hail of Bullets

Tommy Powers goes by this credo: live fast, die young, and leave a corpse so riddled with bullets, not even his mother can look at his body when he’s done. But then, no one can end a film like Cagney. He’s danced down the White House stairs in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), been rolled across the concrete steps of a city church in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and was blown to kingdom come in White Heat. He gets two death scenes in The Public Enemy, a rain-soaked climax, and a denouement as scary as The Mummy. Tommy only brings one gun to the gang fight, and by the time he hits the pavement, he’s got more holes in him than the city sewage system.

“I ain’t so tough,” Tommy says on his final roll into the gutter. Cagney’s first professional job was in a musical drag act on the Vaudeville circuit, and he called himself a “song and dance man” long after retirement. For The Public Enemy, conductor David Mendoza led the Vitaphone Orchestra through such period hits as “Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye),” “Smiles,” and “I Surrender Dear.” But the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” is the one which lingers in the memory. Martin Scorsese has cited it as a reason his films are so filled with recognizable music.

Street violence comes with a natural soundtrack. Transistor radios accompany takedowns. Boom boxes blast during shakedowns. Car stereos boost the bass during drive-by shootings. In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, mobsters feed quarters into a jukebox to cover up sounds of a beating.

In The Godfather, Part II, a street band plays traditional Italian songs while Vito Corleone puts bullets in the neighborhood Black Hand, Don Fanucci. The last thing we hear in the abrupt close to the mob series The Sopranos is a Journey song. The first thing Tommy’s mother does when she hears her boy is coming home from the hospital is drop a needle on a record.

The ending leaves us with two questions: Who killed Tommy, and what’s his brother going to do about it? We figure whoever did the job on Powers was probably a low-level button man from Schemer’s rival outfit. Probably even lower down the ladder than Tommy, and on his way up, until another Tommy comes along. Crime only pays in the movies, Edward G. Robinson often joked.

Mike’s reaction to the bandaged corpse is ambiguous. He’s already shown outward signs of the trauma following the horrors of war. Is he clenching his fists in anguish or anger? Is he broken by the battlefield or marching off in vengeance, a soldier on one last duty? Cook’s exit can go either way.

After 90 years, The Public Enemy is still fresh. It’s aged better than Little Caesar or Scarface. Cagney wouldn’t play a gangster again until 1938, but the image is etched so deeply in the persona, audiences forget the vagaries of villainy Hollywood could spin, and the range of characters Cagney could play. He and the film continue to influence filmmakers, inform culture, and surprise audiences. Tommy Powers was just a mug, but those streets are still his.

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plus-size-reader · 5 years

Text

Zombies

Jack Kline x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 1524 words

Warnings: none

Summary: Dean’s daughter introduces Jack to horror movies, but he doesn’t really get it.

———————————————————————————————————

You were a unique kind of human, with your own brand of campy, crazy, goodness and it would be a lie to say it wasn't because of your dad.

Dean hadn't raised you in the traditional way and you could definitely tell. You could shotgun five beers in a row, had every line of the godfather memorized and could unload and reload your rifle in a minute and a half.

Not only that, but because of your years of monster hunting with your him and your uncle Sam, you were pretty well versed in all the spooky things life had to offer.

As it would turn out, one of the side effects of hunting down real nightmares when you were awake was never really being able to get scared.

You just couldn't do it. You'd been made numb by all the actual bloodshed and death you'd seen, but the one thing that send a chill down your spine were horror movies.

You loved the goofiness of cheesy slasher films from the eighties that made monsters seem like so much more fun than they actually were.

It would have been a dream if vampires were like Dracula in your world, that would have been a good time. They weren't refined and classically decent like Bela Lugosi made it out to be, instead they were demonic and vile...and you weren't going to talk about werewolves either.

Everything you hated in real life, was perfect in film.

You loved movies and for someone who had as much trouble as Jack did being comfortable, you were more than willing to share that love with him.

In retrospect, it was a terrible idea to leave you alone with Jack Kline for the night. He didn't know enough about real life to know if what you were telling him was the truth or not, and you were having fun.

You meant well, and you wanted to help him, but above all, you wanted him to be able to have a good time. He had so much turmoil on his soul at all times, and was dealing with so much that he just needed to have a good night of real fun.

Maybe you weren't the most qualified person to show him how to relax and have fun, but damn it, you were pretty good at it.

If there was one thing Dean had taught you how to do, it was remain hopeful in all situations...whether he knew it or not.

You knocked on the door frame slowly, cautiously as if to get Jack's attention before entering his room. The boy's head shot up at the unfamiliar sound, a slight smile blossoming on his face when he saw it was you.

"Hello" he grinned, his happy little demeanor bringing a smile to your own face. For being the devil, this kid really was just a ray of sunshine. For the most part, he had a more positive outlook on life then you did and it was impossible that he was evil.

It didn't matter how many times your dad tried to convince you that he was wrong, or bad, you just didn't believe it.

You couldn't believe it because that kid was the purest creature you'd ever come in contact with in all your life, and no one had filled you with so much light as easily.

Not that you'd ever let him know that of course, you had to keep your badass persona on at all times.

"Hey, do you want to come hang out with me tonight?" you wondered, even if he didn't want to, he didn't have much of a choice...not really. There was no one else around who was going to spend the night watching horror classics all night, Sam was always busy, and your dad had never been a fan.

As far as Dean was concerned, those movies were just a romanticized version of your life and he didn't want to live it even when he had a free few hours.

Luckily for you though, Jack had no idea what he was getting himself into.

"Hang out?" he asked, tilting his head slightly like a dog would when confused. He was getting better at learning all the slang but there were still things he'd yet to figure out.

You nodded, “Hanging out is just spending time together, doing whatever we want” you explain, reaching out to offer him a hand which he casually took.

There was always that sweet innocence around Jack that made you feel safe and in control. He was powerful, arguably more painful than any other being on the planet, but he didn’t seem bothered at all by that responsibility.

It was a good thing that you two had decided to be friends, because making such a powerful enemy wouldn’t have been good for anyone.

“Okay Y/N, let us go hang out” he suggested, tightening his grip lightly on your hand which he used to drag you out toward the living room. There weren’t very many options as far as what to do, so you headed over to the shelf, retrieving your vast horror dvd collection.

Momentarily, you considered asking Jack what he’d like to watch but he wouldn’t really know what he was looking at so you picked something easy to start.

Night of the Living Dead

It was a classical, and it was honestly a crime that Jack hadn’t seen it yet.

“What are we doing with the television set?” he wondered, he’d seen Dean watching it before but had never actually sat in front of the box before.

He didn’t really know enough about it to trust it, but if you were doing it...it couldn’t be that bad. For some reason, Jack had always been drawn to you. You reminded him of his mother, and he found your presence comforting.

“We are going to watch a scary movie” you hummed, setting him down on the couch before sitting down beside him. “Scary movie? You’re going to terrify yourself deliberately?” he wondered, not understanding the point.

Humans could be so confusing.

Still, you nodded, pressing play on the remote and getting comfortable.

Jack stuck to his side of the couch, avoiding all contact with your body, while you sat on the other, a gray fleece blanket thrown over your body to keep the cool air away from your flesh.

And it stayed that way for quite a while.

During a particularly gory scene, your body tensed, truly disturbed by the images flashing across the screen. You didn’t think anything of it, but before you could move on from it, Jack was looking down at you.

He looked alarmed, not sure what was upsetting you so much. He’d gotten the impression that ‘Hanging out’ was supposed to be relaxing but you kept jumping.

“Are you alright Y/N?” He asked, glancing lightly over your entire body to locate whatever it was that was bothering you. Perhaps you were coming down with something, Castiel had informed him of just how fragile humans could be and he was worried.

Jack didn’t want something to be wrong with you.

You weren’t really sure how to react to him. You knew he meant well and was genuinely scared for your well-being, but there was nothing going on. You had just forgotten how bone chilling this movie could get.

It didn’t help that it was just you and Jack in the huge bunker at night.

“I’m fine Jack, this movie is just a little scary” you explained, cuddling up tighter to the blanket that was thrown over your lap.

That seemed to calm his nerves, at least a little bit.

After that, the room went back to comfortable silence save for the groans and moans of the dead coming from the speakers. Jack seemed to forget about the entire thing, until you jumped again.

As soon as your body moved, he had his arm over your shoulder, pulling you tightly into his body.

The motion confused you both, but neither of you really minded. There was something sweet about the gesture and you weren’t about to ruin it, even if it didn’t mean anything.

“What are you doing?” you whispered, looking up at his to meet those blue eyes. There was nothing dismissive in your tone, just wonder. You had no idea what had possessed him to do such a thing.

Jack only shrugged, not loosening the grip he had on your body. “You seemed afraid, so I’m going to protect you” his voice was gentle, in a whisper to match your own even though you two were alone in the house.

It was a perfectly reasonable reason, but you were still just shocked. If Jack had been any other guy, he would have understood that normally there is a romantic connotation with cuddling, but he wasn’t.

He looked at this as a solution to a problem and nothing more, you knew that. You just had to make sure that you didn’t look to far into it because there was nothing between you and Jack.

He was your friend...just your friend.

#jack kline #jack kline x ps reader #jack kline x plus size reader #supernatural #supernatural x reader #supernatural x plus size reader #SPN #spn x reader #spn x plus size reader #spn x ps reader #supernatural x ps reader

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mostlywritersblock · 4 years

Text

Dracula 2019 fic

Part 1

****

Is this a dream?

Of course it is.

You’re drinking my blood.

But my blood is deadly to you.

Yes.

So you’ll die.

So will you.

After all this time

Did you think I’d let it hurt?

****

Dracula awoke.

It was disorienting, not because of any lack of vision but simply because he had awaken.

Something he’d thought he’d never do again.

By all rights, he should be dead.

Well, dead-er.

He was laying on his back, comfortably mind you, staring up at the ceiling when a familiar voice punctured his thoughts.

“I thought it might happen today, or rather I’ve been telling myself that for the past two weeks.” The woman from the foundation spoke.

Bloxham was it or something other?

“Just so you’re aware it’s been a total of 19 days since your attempted suicide”

Attempted suicide? Is that what happened?

“Your lawyer has been dutifully notified of your condition and current occupation of our facility. For more economical reasons I’m sure you can see why you’ll be staying here instead of a hospital until we can safely monitor your progress and rehabilitation.”

Progress? Rehabilitation? What was wrong with him?

“What is wrong with me?” The statement came out far weaker than he intended, and by god was that really his voice? Such a pitiful thing!

Bloxham stared at him blankly. “I just told you, attempted suicide.”

She stepped out of view but he could still hear her. “Now that you’re awake I’ll have the doctors come examine you. Try not to hold back on anything, the more information you provide the better.”

A series of scenes played out suddenly before him, ripping his focus away from the present to-

A flash of light, so intense, like the sun itself-

The sun.

Agatha.

He could hear retreating footsteps.

“Wait.”

Bloxham hesitated. “Yes?”

“Aga-Dr. Helsing. Zoe, where is she?”

There was a long pause.

“She’s alive, I’m not allowed to say anymore on the subject.” And she briskly walked out of the room. Dracula listened as the soft hiss of the door sealed behind her.

Ah.

So he was back in the glass cage. Wonderful.

****

The doctors poked, prodded, and took blood samples for a sum of 75 hours before Dracula got fed up and snapped one of their necks. The rest quickly fleeing the room as he viscously bit into the dying mans jugular. It was delicious.

Keep dangling a carrot in front of a starving rabbit and they’re bound to take your finger along with it.

****

The blood seemed to have done some good, and he wasn’t the only one to notice. The next following days consisted of Bloxham gathering up as many volunteers as she could to start giving him blood. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever but he felt he should play by the rules just for a little while longer.

Just until he had regained his strength.

****

By the gods. He was going to go mad of boredom. He’d requested -what - at least a dozen times by now, for some form of entertainment. A book, magazine, some new eletro-technological gizmo. Anything. But it was as if his request fell on deff ears. Which wasn’t possible. Which meant they were ignoring him.

Dracula sighed dramatically. He’d also requested for his lawyer, though he now supposes that won’t be happening anytime soon either.

****

He kept seeing her.

Not in his dreams - because, well, that wasn’t really possible at the moment- but in the shadows of his cage.

Agatha.

He hadn’t heard anything more since he’d first asked about her. It was as if the topic of one Dr. Zoe Helsing was taboo, classified, unmerited information that he was definitely not privy to.

No matter. He was counting down the days now.

Soon.

****

He’d surmised he’s been held prisoner at the foundation for a total of 39 days, 14 hours, and 45 minutes when the alarm sounded throughout the corridor. An unnecessary red light bouncing about the walls.

He slid the key card into place and a mechanical hiss sounded as he pushed the the final door open.

Fresh air rushed to great him. Along with twenty or so armed guns.

Dracula didn’t bat an eye as he rushed them. The sun grinning down on him when he slaughtered them all.

***

All that time in the foundation and no one had been one step closer to discovering how he was still alive. The one mystery he was actually hoping they’d solve before he jumped ship. Oh well. Now to find the real answers, with the only person who could possibly provide them.

He hoped at least.

****

He was surprised to find that Zoe was not actually where he had expected her to be.

He had thought, naturally, that with all the secrecy that obviously whatever information they had was not of the positive sort. Meaning he assumed he’d find her half dead in a hospital riding out the tale ends of her cancer.

Not. Outside a cheap flat lounging in the shade with a beverage smelling strongly of alcohol.

When Zoe finally noticed his chilling presence she gifted him with a small smile.

“Took you long enough.”

*****

He was to say very bluntly. Not pleased. Not pleased at all to discover Zoe did Not in fact have all the answers.

He was pleased however to note that she had miraculously been somewhat cured of the cancer. A miracle they were both certain he had a hand in doing.

Another piece of the puzzle yet unsolved.

She’s currently undergoing chemo, a last ditch effort by her doctors to make sure the cancer never comes back. But Zoe says everyday she feels a little stronger, a little less like the poison is in her veins.

Dracula supposes he’s happy for her.

Happy to have the company now that they’re not constantly at each other’s throats.

But he’s still a vampire, a fact they’re both acutely aware of as time passes by.

Dracula leaves sometime in the night, Zoe’s warm body curling into the space he previously occupied.

It’s not goodbye. But he needs sometime to collect his thoughts and -

He needs to feed.

****

Zoe finds him not even two days later.

“You know running off in the middle of the night is not going to solve any of your problems.” She states taking a seat in his temporary domicile.

Dracula rolls his eyes, “It doesn’t unsolve them either, Zoe. I’m driving myself mad with explanations, scenarios that make no sense and facts that don’t add up.”

He paces a few steps. “By all accounts I should not be here. I should dead, not undead.”

“Careful it almost sounds like you’re regretting being a vampire.”

Dracula frowned. “You know that’s not what I’m saying. I just wish to understand, nothing like this has happened before.”

Zoe sighed, “ Look it’s not like you went around drinking sick blood all the time, or for the length you drank mine. Who’s to say you can’t die from it. Maybe it just severely weakens you, like a vampire kryptonite.”

“Like a vampire what?” Confusion crossed his face as he tried to distinguish the strange word. And here he’d thought he was doing pretty well in this century.

“It’s Superm- you know what I’ll get you the comic sometime. Anyway, we really don’t know what kind of effect sick blood may have.”

Dracula scoffed. “Oh and me practically dying isn’t effective enough for you?”

“Not when you can come back good as new, no.”

Dracula smiled dangerously, “There’s the cold nun we all love to hate. Don’t suppose you’re hoping I’ll try it out again and stay dead next time.”

“One can only hope.” Came the distinctive foreign reply.

“Well I’m not, so there’s another dead-end for you.” He sneered. Zoe took in a deep breath

“Look, I want to get to the bottom of this just as much as you do, but you ran away from the one place that could possibly offer some kind of scientific explanation.”

Dracula released a low growl, “I’m not going back there.”

“I’m not asking you to I’m just-“

A loud buzzing filled the room, Zoe frowned sharply before tearing into her purse to dig out her phone. She glanced at the screen briefly before answering.

“Yes? What is it now?”

Dracula stared intently at his shoes trying not to grow impatient.

“Again? This is the third time this month, yes I know he escaped twice thank you Margo. Yes. Yes he’s with me. Yes I’ll tell you. Look, now isn’t a good time, I’ll call you later. Tell Florence to just reschedule their meeting, I won’t be in tomorrow. Thursday? Fine, yes, whatever works. Yes, goodbye.” Zoe let out an exhausted sigh as she lightly slammed her phone face down onto her lap.

“Trouble in paradise?”

“Trouble you caused.”

“Oh what have I done now?” Dracula mock pouted

“The contributors - our sponsors are reviewing the foundation, again. Apparently the fact that you escaped twice puts us under strict scrutiny.”

“Ah, I don’t blame them, for the price they’re paying I’d put your organization under strict scrutiny too.”

“It’s your bloody fault!” Another deep breath, “And it isn’t my organization, I just help run it.”

“What happened to early retirement?”

“I’m not dying now, why should I give up when we were really starting to see a breakthrough.” She quipped sarcastically.

Dracula chuckled, “Point taken.”

****

Turns out running an organization that your not legally obligated to run takes a lot of time and effort, both of which Zoe was finding hard to balance, especially with an over demanding, narcissistic, ego-centric vampire breathing down her neck. Oh and she also wasn’t trying to kill him, or capture him, or run test on him this time.

So.

There was that.

Zoe figured her sudden lack of animosity towards the man remained largely on the fact that he saved her. Or rather drained the sick right out if her.

So now she can’t help but feel a little obligated to offer aid in this troublesome mystery. Even if that means lying to half her staff the whereabouts of Dracula’s location.

However, the animosity spikes at certain moments too.

They usually coincide with Dracula’s feeding habits.

*****

TBC

#I’M SORRY IF THERE ARE SPELLING ERRORS #I tried my best but I wrote this weeks ago at like 3am #dracula #agatha van helsing #dracula 2019 #johnathan harker #part1 of idk #takes place after the last episode bc I was not happy with said ending #my boy harker gonna get a better story this time just you wait and see #this is probably going to be Dracula/Harker eventually js #but maybe Zoe/Drac if you squint reaaall hard #zoe van helsing

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blorgon-schmorgon · 4 years

Text

Btvs rewatch 2k19/2k20 (1x08, I Robot, You Jane)

Continuing my not-so-weekly rewatch of buffy with my partner, we just watched I Robot, You Jane… we actually watched Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, The Pack, and Angel a while ago and I do indeed have Thoughts written out in note form on my iPhone…but I have yet to put them into any coherent form so I might return to them at some point.

For now, I’m going to try to make sense of what is supposedly another contender for the worst episode of BtVS.

On transmediation and digital fears:

If there is anything to take away from this episode, it is its commentary on media and transmediation, fitting for the genre-bending, postmodern pastiche the show would evolve into. From the start, the show has been riffing on horror tropes and movies, but this is the first episode that actually explores what media is, does, and can be – these ideas will be explored with much more finesse and deftness in later seasons, with episodes like Once More With Feeling, Storyteller, Buffy vs Dracula, Restless, Superstar and I’m sure many others that I can’t think of right now. In doing so, this is arguably the first episode to look at itself, a self-awareness that will continue to define and shape the series in years to come. This is after all, the episode with the line: “Besides, I can just tell something's wrong. My spider sense is tingling . . . Pop culture reference, sorry.” This is also one of the most widely reviled episodes – The Passion of the Nerd’s review only offers a drinking game for everything the show gets wrong about computers, it is widely critiqued for being a terrible Willow episode, morgue calls out its bizarre tonal shifts and boring monster, and criticallytouched comments on its absolute bungling of digital horror and its lack of subtlety with regards to those themes. Its last scene, however, is widely loved for the self-aware moment in which the Scooby gang commiserate over how they’ll never have a healthy relationship, which morgue refers to as a moment in which Buffy is placed firmly into the “post-modernist mode of self-aware 90s entertainment, and combined into one scene they come close to breaking the fourth wall and knowing they are characters in a TV show”.

This post-modern self-awareness pervades the episode though! The monster in this episode is essentially a transmedial monster, moving from interface to interface, attempting to become flesh again, moving from book to digital space to a robot body. It is a pity this episode is so clunky – this is a fascinating concept! A network monster! My partner called this proto-proto Black Mirror, and in today’s renewed moment of digital pessimism, it’s interesting how much this episode’s technophobia continues to resonate. Even the men controlled by Moloch seem to be the precursors to the Trio in season 6, who are now read as the precursors to contemporary incels.

The episode itself is intimately concerned with media – the thoroughline to this episode is the introduction of Jenny Calendar, a technopagan who spars with Giles over the promises and drawbacks of the digital age. Jenny argues that technology democratizes knowledge, evidentiated by her own participation in a technopagan online community, with magic no longer bound up in the musty books of a handful of white guys (her words!). Giles on the other hand, abhors the way this democratization loses the specific quality and texture of knowledge found in books, losing the unique “smell” books possess, stripped of sensory and material pleasure. The show takes a few potshots at itself as a TV show in the process – at one point, Jenny refers to TV as “the idiot box” as opposed to the “good box” that is computers; at another point, Jenny tells Giles he’s been watching too many movies.

The unbinding and democratization of knowledge is reflected in the actual unbinding of Moloch, and their inability to return him to a book, which today feels like a commentary on how the Internet unwittingly creates platforms for ancient evils to re-emerge and take new forms in a Hydra-like manner. As noted earlier, this calls to mind the creation of the incel ideology and newfound fascisms that have taken root in online spaces, recalling the fascisms of the 1920’s. Moloch himself, as a demon feeding on love, is an ideological monster, making him particularly apt for a digital monstrosity that creates cults and followers. While the intended metaphor was about the dangers of online dating, the contemporary resonance of this episode is far more about the dangers of online cults, which I find a far more interesting story to chew on. Another thing this episodes hints at is the emergence of fake news – throughout the episode, background characters are overheard noticing odd things about the digital sphere, like a nurse saying someone’s records had been changed. It’s not a particularly interesting development, but it is an interesting historical moment to think over. With the introduction of new information technologies, anxieties over fake information always emerge, which also happened with the introduction of the printing press in 1440. Amusingly, Moloch is binded before the printing press, during the time in which each book was actually individually printed and bound, speaking to Giles’ taste for the unique and specific.

The episode ends when Moloch is finally bound to a robot body, making him killable – the corollary is that if he had remained in the Internet, it would have been impossible for a Slayer to defeat him. True to form, the show will struggle to depict these kinds of networked monsters that exist beyond a specific form, and will only really return to this concept with The First Evil in season 7 (and arguably The First Slayer in Restless). These monsters, which cannot be fought in hand-to-hand combat, provoke a unique conundrum for the show to depict satisfyingly. Moloch is a far more deadly creature on the Internet than he is in a robot body.

Am I overthinking this episode? Probably! But it is an interesting historical artefact (more than it is an interesting Buffy episode), and in the context of a show concerned with media and postmodernism, it has a surprising amount of insights and leads to follow. It’s a pretty meh showing for the characters and dialogue, and definitely nowhere near as good as the show will get, but it’s not as terrible as people make it out to be!

A few other notes:

This is one of the only early episodes to play on surveillance themes – these themes will emerge again in season 4 and 6, as detailed in impalementation’s imagery series of the show.

Morgue’s review argues that one of the reasons this episode doesn’t work is that it ventures too far out beyond the high school scale – yet what I really like about this episode upon rewatch is how creepy it makes the computer lab and the girls’ locker room – these are very specific places to make scary, and goes beyond just the creepy classroom aesthetic that defines some of the more high school Buffy episodes! The specificity of making the computer room scary really appeals to me.

#btvs rewatch 2k19 #btvs rewatch 2k20 #buffy the vampire sla #buffy the vampire slayer rewatch #buffy the vampire slayer meta #btvs meta #i robot you jane #btvs 1x08 #btvs

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ebaeschnbliah · 5 years

Text

SCANDINAVIAN REFERENCES

________________________________________________________________

In Sherlock BBC - and also a little bit outside of it

While writing on DISTRACTION & CONSEQUENCES and CABIN ON THE MEADOW, involving Phil with his ‘explosive’ car and the Hiker with the bashed-in head, I couldn’t fail to notice that Phil’s unmoving car is a SAAB … which is a Swedish brand.

According to the informations given during the promotion campaingn for the Escapre Room, TheGameIsNow, Sherlock lives currently in Sweden. Since these aren’t the only occasions where Scandinavian regions are mentioned in Sherlock BBC, the suspicion inevitably arose that those references could be of some importance. Reason enough to make another little list. :)

TBC below the cut ….

Short definition of Scandinavia

The term Scandinavia in local usage covers the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

In English usage, Scandinavia also sometimes refers to the Scandinavian Peninsula, or to the broader region including Finland and Iceland. x

A Scandal in Belgravia

As mentioned above, Phil’s immobile car, which ‘explodes’ and thus distracts the Hiker who, as a consequence, is killed by his own boomerang, is of the Swedish brand SAAB.

The Empty Hearse

Mr. Howard Shilcott, the ‘train guy (and mirror for Sherlock), possesses important informations about the Underground station at Sumatra Road, which once was built but then closed before it ever opened. He wears a ‘funny hat with earflaps’ made of Islandic sheep wool. That hat becomes an object of significance when Sherlock invites his brother to play deductions with him, just like in the old days.

MYCROFT: The earlier patches are extensively sun-bleached, so he’s worn it abroad – in Peru. SHERLOCK: Peru? MYCROFT: This is a chullo – the classic headgear of the Andes. It’s made of alpaca. SHERLOCK: No. MYCROFT: No? SHERLOCK: Icelandic sheep wool. Similar, but very distinctive if you know what you’re looking for. I’ve written a blog on the varying tensile strengths of different natural fibres.

His Last Vow

The main villain of this episode is designed after Doyle’s British character Charles Augustus Milverton. For some reason, in this adaptation, name and origin of the man have been changed into Charles Augustus Magnussen, who is now from Denmark. The fact that he is ‘foreign’ is driven home explicitly right at the beginning of the episode by the dialogue as well as the accent of the man, who is played by Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen.

GARVIE: Do you think it right that a newspaper proprietor, a private individual and, in fact, a foreign national should have such regular access to our Prime Minister? MAGNUSSEN: I don’t think it’s wrong that a private individual should accept an invitation. However, you have my sincere apologies for being foreign.

The Six Thatchers

Mr. Kingsley, a client, thinks that Sherlock’s deductions, once explained, are actually dead simple. Highly annoyed, Sherlock spontaneously invents a ludicrous story and tells the shocked man that his wife is actually Greta Bengtsdotter, Swedish by birth and the most dangerous spy in the world. She secretly works for none other than James Moriarty and uses her unsuspecting husband as cover to hide her true intentions which will finally precipitate in World War III.

The first location Mary visits on her hiatus is Norddal in Norway. That’s a small place (ca. 1660 inhabitants) deep inside the Storfjord. Here she picks up a fake passport hidden inside the stonewall of a coastal watchtower. Her new name, Gabrielle Ashdown, is taken from TPLOSH, where Holmes chooses the pseudonym ‘Mr. and Mrs. Ashdown’ for himself and Gabrielle Valladon, the woman who consulted him in the case of her missing husband but is actually Ilse von Hofmannsthal, a German spy who pretends to be Mrs. Valladon.

The Final Problem

One of the very last scenes of this episode shows a man dressed as Viking, including the (cliched) horned helmet. He lies motionless on the floor in the livingroom of 221b Baker Street (played by Paul Weller). John bends over him and examines his left eye.

Vikings were highly skilled Norse seafarers who raided and pillaged (like pirates) with their infamous longboats (also well known as dragonboats). They acted as mercenaries but also as merchants, who traded goods across wide areas of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, European Russia and the North Atlantic islands. Some of them even reached the North-Eastern coast of North America. (X)

That Viking is not the only character in this story who ‘wears horns’. Furthermore, cow horns are also connected to the eye-goddess Hathor, whose other, dangerous side is represented by lioness goddess Sekhmet.

The way this Viking lays there … one leg sharply angled at the knee, the foot shoved beneath the other, outstretched leg and both arms straight beside his torso … it’s a bit odd and strangely reminds me of the ‘dancing men’ drawn on the blackboard in the shot displayed immediately before this one. It almost looks like the way this man lies there could have some meaning.

And something else comes to mind: the way John bends over the Viking stunningly resembles the scene from Magnussen’s office in HLV, when Sherlock got shot by Mary. One could even say, there are three potential ‘pirates’ gathered in Magnusson’s bedroom in that scene ... Sherlock, John and ‘Viking descendent’ Magnussen. Interesting ...

The Game is Now - Escape Room Promotion

With the cliffhanger of The Final Problem in mind and still no official announcement regarding a fifth series on the horizon, one could come to the assumption that the ‘TheGameIsNow- EscapeRoom’ event serves as a sort of interlude and somehow resembles a ‘SherlockBBC-Hiatus’ (hopefully). Isn’t it interesting that here too, Scandinavia seems to play a role?

During the conversation with Mycroft, in the intercepted message Nr 1, Sherlock mentions that he currently is in Sweden.

During the intercepted message Nr 2 a map of Scandinavia is shown in the background with informations regarding its natural recources: iron ore, copper, zinc, gold, IKEA and uranium.

Additionally Mycroft confirms a second time where his brother might be found at the moment: ‘Missing, rumoured to be in Sweden’ is written below a picture of Sherlock, kept in black and white, but temporarily overlaid with pink and green (Study in Pink and Green)

Scandinavian canon reference regarding the ‘hiatus’

In Doyle’s original story The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes tells Dr. Watson after their reunion that, for some time during his hiatus, he had stayed in Norway under a fake identity.

“You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.” (ACD, The Empty House)

Using Sherlock’s own words from The Great Game, one could say that, by now, the story told in Sherlock BBC as well as the EscapeRoom event have a … ‘distinctly Scandinavian feeling about it’. :)

Some Scandinavian side notes outside Sherlock BBC

Not Sherlock related. Should be taken with caution and humor:

Radio Times, November 2018: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss reveale that Danish actor Claes Bang will be playing Dracula in their new series. ‘Hell has a new boss’ says the headline. Strictly speaking, the boss in Hell is generally considered to be the Devil (maybe also his grandma :) but surely not Dracula, who is after all just a human who desired immortal strength to protect and revenge the ones whom he loved. At least, that’s the story told in ….

Dracula Untold (2014) - some quotes:

"One day I will call on you to serve me in an immortal game of revenge … to unleash my wrath against the one who betrayed me."

“This is not a game!”

"Oh, what better way to endure eternity. For this, is the ultimate game. Light versus dark, hope versus despair. And all the world's fate hangs into the balance."

Vlad Dracula meets his creator Let the games begin

“You want me to shake hands with you in Hell? I shall not disappoint you.“ (Sherlock at Jim Moriarty, TRF)

How Dracula BBC came into being

“It came about several years ago,” Gatiss said. “We were filming — we’d just started the third series of Sherlock, where he comes back from the dead, and we had to break off after two days to go to the RTS Awards (March, 2013) and I had a picture on my phone of Benedict silhouetted against the door of Mrs Hudson’s room. I showed it to Ben Stephenson, who was then the Head of Drama [at the BBC], and I said, ‘Looks like Dracula’. And he said, ‘Do you want to do it?'” (RadioTimes, April 2019)

“We’re gonna go all Dane“

The same article from RadioTimes, contains an interview with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. When asked about their upcomming mini-series ‘Dracula’, if there will be more ‘homegrown talents’ among the cast, the producers answered the question in their most familiar way - with lots of laughter and giggling - obviously taking much pleasure in the announcement of their new ‘informations’.

“No, no ..., it’s strictly Dane from now on. We're only casting over Denmark. I don’t think Denmark’s being sufficiently represented and so we’re gonna go all Dane.”

Strictly Danes …. well, well …. I’m more curious than ever ... and extremely exited! :))))

On Scandinavian name-giving tradition

It is a well known custom in Scandinavian regions to create personal names based on the given name of one’s father, grandfather or male ancestor by adding the ending -son/-sen/-søn or -dotter/-dottir/-dattir. This is called a patronymic (while the same method based on the mother’s name is called matronymic). A good example for this in Sherlock BBC is the character Charles Augustus Magnussen …. Magnus-sen = son of Magnus.

This kind of Scandinavian name-giving tradition is based entirely on first names. Just assuming though, this method would also be applied to last names, then ... a female descendent of someone with the family name ‘Bang’ could be named ... ‘Bangsdotter’. :)))

A last funny detail: the subtitles for Sherlock BBC, Series 4 (British Edition), display the name of the famous Swedish spy, Sherlock invents in TST, as Greta Bengsdotter. The correct spelling of the first name of Greta’s father (used here as patronymic) isn’t Beng though …. but Bengt.

Bengt (female, Bengta) is the Swedish equivalent of … Benedict. :)))

As I said above ... to be taken with caution and humor. :)))))

Thanks @callie-ariane for the scripts. Related post by @tendergingergirl

Mai 2019

#scandinavian references #sherlock bbc #the game is now #escape room #scandinavia #sweden #norway #denmark #iceland #dracula untold #hell has a new boss #let the games begin #this is not a game #vlad dracula

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dominatie · 4 years

Note

ships? you want ship you bastad/? soma x jonathan

Send me a ship and I’ll answer:

Gives nose/forehead kisses: Jonathan gives more of these. He’s an American and he’s taller than Soma. Soma sometimes gets a little huffy about it because it’s cute and Jonathan is very cute and Soma gets all those fluttering emotions because of it.Gets jealous the most:Hard to say… Jonathan and Soma both have some sort of rejection sensitivity. If Soma saw Jonathan with Charlotte and saw how happy they make each other, he might start to think that he was just in the way and get jealous that he couldn’t be normal like her. Jonathan might get jealous of how many people are supporting Soma as opposed to him. Takes care of on sick days:Soma doesn’t often get sick, but when he does… he’s out for the count. He’d need a hand doing things and I’m sure Jonathan would love to be helpful and show him how good he is at taking care of things.Drags the other person out into the water on beach day: Soma drags Jonathan out, but it’s only because he wants to show him how long he can hold his breath underwater. Soma ends up scaring the hell out of Jonathan because Soma can breathe underwater with the right soul and he fails to inform him of this first.Brings the other lunch at work:All I can think about here is Jonathan going out hunting and Soma carrying a bento box to him in his bat form. That’s so cute that I might actually die so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this is what would happen. Soma landing on Jonathan ‘s shoulder with this box strapped to his back that’s way too big for him…Tries to start role-playing in bed: Soma is definitely from a more sexually liberated time, so probably him. C’mon, Jonathan… you wanna shove your long, hard wood deep inside Dracula ;0?Embarrassingly drunk dancer: Soma. He goes to get drinks with Jonathan after they have a successful hunt and that’s what he does if he still has enough energy when they get home. He’ll probably end up tripping over something and hurting himself.Firmly believes in couples costumes: I feel like they…both would find this silly and a little embarrassing, but I think Jonathan would like it a lot. And Soma would like ‘looking good’ with someone. Breaks the expensive gift rule during Christmas: Neither of them. Soma doesn’t have the funds to break it and Jonathan grew up during the Great Depression, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of not splurging too much. Makes the other eat breakfast:I feel like they’d alternate. It depends on a number of complex factors like… who slept in the longest because of their depression… who is hungrier… who has the bigger craving for pancakes…Remembers anniversaries: Soma does. He has them on his phone calendar all marked out. He tries to leave little reminders when the time gets closer so Jonathan can also remember more easily.Brings up having kids first:This… is hard. Both of them actually want kids. Soma wants kids so badly, but he isn’t sure how he wants to go about it. He isn’t sure how much danger a child of his would be in simply by existing… Maybe Jonathan would have to be the one to bring it up.Kills the bugs:Soma does not kill the bugs. He takes them and releases them outside. Jonathan might.First to define them as a couple:Probably Soma… because both of them are young men and Jonathan is not from a time period where saying that would be…acceptable. I can see Soma telling someone and Jonathan bristling and expecting that person to react poorly only for them to be like ‘oh okay.’ And Jonathan is just stunned.Who hides their guilty pleasures longer:Soma. He’s easily embarrassed and doesn’t like to tell people about things he does that aren’t ‘normal.’ He doesn’t like being teased for things like this.Snorts while laughing:Both of them. Sometimes, it even causes a chain reaction where they both end up laughing and giggling and snorting.

#[ i love...Soma and Jonathan they're so cute ]#mildewsmuses

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chiseler · 5 years

Text

The Chiseler Interviews Tim Lucas

Born in 1956, film historian, novelist and screenwriter Tim Lucas is the author of several books, including the award-winning Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula, and Throat Sprockets. He launched Video Watchdog magazine in 1990, and his screenplay, The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, has been optioned by Joe Dante. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife Donna.

The following interview was conducted via email.

THE CHISELER: You're known for your longstanding love affair with horror films. Could you perhaps explain this allure they hold for you?

Tim Lucas: I suppose they’ve meant different things to me at different times of my life. When I was very young (and I started going to movies at my local theater alone, when I was about six), I was attracted to them as something fun but also as a means of overcoming my fears - I would sometimes go to see the same movie again until I could stop hiding my eyes, and I would often find out they showed me a good deal less than I saw behind my hands, so I learned that when I was hiding my eyes my own imagination took over. This encouraged me to look, but also to impose my own imagination on what I was seeing. Similarly, I remember flinching at pictures of various monsters in FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND magazine, then realizing that, as I became able to stop flinching, to look more deeply into the pictures, I began to feel compassion for Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and admiration for Jack Pierce’s makeup. You could say that I learned some valuable life lessons from this: not to make snap judgements, not to hate or fear someone else because they looked different. I should also point out that beauty had the same intense effect on me as ugliness, in those early days at the movies. I was as frightened by the glowing light promising another appearance by the Blue Fairy in PINOCCHIO as I was by Stromboli or Monstro the Whale. I also covered my eyes when things, even colors, became too beautiful to bear.

As I got older, I found out that horror, science fiction, and fantasy films often told the unpleasant truths about our world, our government, our politics, and other people, before such things could be openly confronted in straightforward drama. So I’m not one of those people who are drawn to horror by gore or some other superficial incentive; I have always responded to them because they made me aware of unpopular truths, because they made me a more empathic person, and because they sometimes encompass a very unusual form of beauty that you can’t find in reality or in any other kind of film.

THE CHISELER: I'm fascinated by what you term "a very specific hybrid of beauty that you can’t find in reality or in any other kind of film.” Please develop that point.

Tim Lucas: For example, the aesthetic put forward by the films of David Lynch... or Tim Burton... or Mario Bava... or Roger Corman... or Val Lewton... or James Whale... or F.W. Murnau. It's incredibly varied, really; too varied to be summarized by a single name, but it's dark and baroque with a broader, deeper spectrum of color. I’ll give you an example: there is a Sax Rohmer novel called YELLOW SHADOWS - and only in a horror film can you see truly yellow shadows. Or green shadows. Or a fleck of red light on a vine somewhere out of doors. It’s a painterly version of reality, akin to what people see in film noir but even more psychological. It might be described as a visible confirmation of how the past survives in everything - we can see new artists quoting from a past master, making their essence their own.

THE CHISELER: Your definition of horror, to me, goes straight to the heart of cinema as an almost metaphysical phenomenon. My friend and frequent co-writer, Jennifer Matsui, once wrote: "Celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion." Do Italian directors have what I guess you can call special epiphanies to offer? If so, does this help explain your Bava book?

Tim Lucas: The epiphanies of Italian horror all arise from the culture that was inculcated into those filmmakers as young people - the awareness of architecture, painting, writing, myth, legend, music, sculpture that they all grow up with. It's so much richer than any films that can be made by people with no foundation in the other art forms, people who makes movies just because they've seen a few - and maybe cannot even be bothered to watch any in black and white. I imagine many people go into the film business for reasons having to do with sex or power rather than having something deep down they need to express. The most stupid Italian and French directors have infinitely more in their artistic arsenals than directors from the USA, because they are brought up with an awareness of the importance of the Arts. No one gets this in America, where we slash arts and education budgets and many parents just sit their children in front of a television. Without supervision, without a sense of context, they will inevitably be drawn to whatever is loudest or most colorful or whatever has the most edits per minute. And those kids are now making blockbusters. They make money, so why screw with the formula? When I was a kid, it was still possible to find important, nurturing material on TV - fortunately!

Does it explain my Bava book? I don't know, but Bava's films somehow encouraged and sustained the passion that saw me through the researching and writing of that book, which took 32 years. When my book first came out, some people took me to task for its presumed excess - on the grounds that “our great directors” like John Ford and Orson Welles, for all their greatness, had never inspired a book of such size or magnitude. I could only answer that my love for my subject must be greater. But the thing about the Bava book, really, was that - at that time - the playing field was pretty much virgin territory in English, and Bava as a worker in the Italian film industry touched just about everything that industry had encompassed. All of those relationships needed charting. It would have been an insult to merely pigeonhole him as a horror director.

THE CHISELER: I discovered your publication, Video Watchdog, back in 2000 when Kim's Video was something of an underground institution here in NYC. I mean, they openly hawked bootlegs. There was a real sense of finding the unexpected which gave the place a genuine mystique. Now that you've had some time to reflect on its heyday, what are your thoughts, generally, on VW?

Tim Lucas: It's hard to explain to someone who just caught on in 2000, when things were already very different and more incorporated. VIDEO WATCHDOG began in 1990 as a magazine, but before that it was a feature in other magazines of different sorts that began in 1986. At that time, I was reviewing VHS releases for a Chicago-based magazine called VIDEO MOVIES, which then had a title change to VIDEO TIMES. I pointed out to my editor that his writers were reviewing the films and not saying anything about their presentation on video, and urged him to make more of a mandate about discussing aspect ratios, missing scenes (or added scenes) and such. I proposed that I write a column that would start collecting such information and that column was called "The Video Watchdog.”

In 2000, VW's origins in Beta and VHS and LaserDisc had evolved to DVD and Blu-ray was on the point of being introduced, so by then most of the battles we identified and fought had already been won and assimilated into the way movies were being presented on video. But in our early days, my fellow writers and I - were making our readers aware of filmmakers like Bava, Argento, Avati, Franco, Rollin, Ptushko, Zuławski - and the conversation we started led to people seeking out these films through non-official channels, even forming those non-official channels, until the larger companies began to realize there was an exploitable market there. Our coverage was never limited to horror - horror was sort of the hub of our interest, which radiated out into the works of any filmmaker whose work seemed in some way paranormal - everyone from Powell and Pressburger to Ishiro Honda to Krzystof Kiesłowski.

Now that the magazine is behind me, I can see more easily that we were part of a process, perhaps an integral part, of identifying and disseminating some very arcane information and, by sharing our own processes of discovery, raising the general consciousness about innumerable marginal and maverick filmmakers. A lot of our readers went on to become filmmakers (some already were) and many also went on to form home video companies or work in the business.

I'm proud of what we were able to achieve, and that what were written as timely reports have endured as still useful, still relevant criticism. Magazines tend to be snapshots of the present, and our back issues have that aspect, but our readers still tell me that the work is holding up, it’s not getting old.

When I say "we," I mean numerous writers who shared my pretentious ethic and were able to push genre criticism beyond the dismissive critical writing about genre film that was standard in 1990. I mentioned this state of things in my first editorial, that the gore approach wasn’t encouraging anyone to take horror as a genre more seriously, and I do think horror became more respectable over the years we were publishing.

THE CHISELER: My own personal touchstone, Raymond Durgnat, drilled deep into genre — particularly horror films — while pushing back instinctively against the Auteur Theory. No critic will ever write with more infatuated precision about Barbara Steele, whose image graces the cover of your Bava tome. Do you have any personal favorites in that regard; any individual author or works that acted as a kind of Virgil for you?

Tim Lucas: I haven't read Durgnat extensively, but when I discovered him in the 1970s his books FRANJU and A MIRROR FOR ENGLAND were gospel to me. Tom Milne's genre reviews for MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN were always intelligent and well-informed. Ivan Butler’s HORROR IN THE CINEMA was the first real book I read on the subject, along with HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT - and I remember focusing on Butler’s chapter on REPULSION, an entire fascinating chapter on a single film, which I hadn’t actually seen. It showed me the film and also how to watch it, so that when it finally came to my local television station, I was ready to meet it head on. David Pirie’s books A HERITAGE OF HORROR and THE VAMPIRE CINEMA I read to pieces. But it was Joe Dante's sometimes uncredited writing in CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN magazine that first hooked my interest in this direction - followed by the earliest issues of CINEFANTASTIQUE, which I discovered with their third issue and for which I became a regular reviewer and correspondent in 1972. I continued to write for them for the next 11 years.

THE CHISELER: I was wondering how you responded to these periodic shifts in taste and sexual politics, especially as they address horror movies — or even something like feminist critiques of the promiscuity of rage against women evident all throughout Giallo; the fear of female agency and power which is never too far from the surface. Are sexism, and even homophobia, simply inherent to the genre?

Tim Lucas: None of that really matters very much to me. I've been around so long now, I can see these recurring waves of people trying to catch their own wave of time, to make an imprint on it in some way. For some reason, I find myself annoyed by newish labels like "folk horror" and "J-horror" because such films have been with us forever; they didn't need such identification before and they have only been invented to get us more quickly to a point, and sometimes these au courant labels simply rebrand work without bringing anything substantially new to the discussion. Every time I read an article about the giallo film, I have to suffer through another explanation of what it is - and this is a genre whose busiest time frame was half a century ago. Sexism and homophobia are things people generally only understand in terms of the now, and I don’t know how fair it is to apply such concepts to films made so long ago. Think of Maria’s torrid dance in METROPOLIS and all those ravenous young men in tuxedos eating her with their eyes. Sexist, yes - but that’s not the point Lang was making.

I don’t particularly see myself as normal, but I suppose I am centrist in most ways. I don’t bring an agenda to the films I write about, other than wanting them to be as complete and beautifully restored as possible. That said, I am interested in, say, feminist takes on giallo films or homosexual readings of Herman Cohen films because - after all - we all bring ourselves to the movies, and if there’s more to be learned about a film I admire, from outside my own experience, that can be precious information. I want to know it and see if I can agree with it, or even if it causes me to feel something new and unfamiliar about it.

My only real concern is that genre criticism tends to be either academic or conversational (even colloquial), and we’re now at a point where the points made by articles published 20 or more years ago are coming back presented as new information, without any idea (or concern) that these things have already been said. As magazines are going by the wayside, taking their place is talk on social media, which is not really disciplined or constructive, nor indeed easily retrievable for reference. There are also audio commentaries on DVD and Blu-ray discs. Fortunately, there are a number of good and serious people doing these, but even when you get very intelligent or intellectual commentators, they often work best with the movie image turned off, because it’s a distraction from what’s being said. Is that true commentary? I'm not an academic; I’m an autodidact, so I don't have the educational background to qualify as a true intellectual, and I feel left out by a lot of academic writing. I do read a good deal and have familiarity with a fair range of topics, so I tend to frame myself somewhere between the vox populist and academia. That's the area we pursued in VW.

THE CHISELER: David Cairns and I once published a critical appreciation of Giallo, using fundamentally Roman Catholic misogyny — and, to a lesser extent, fear of gay men — as an intriguing lens. For example, lesbians are invariably sinister figures in these movies, while straight women ultimately function as nothing more than cinematographic objects: very fetishized, very well-lit corpses, you might say.

Tim Lucas: See, I admire a lot of giallo films but it would never occur to me to see them through a lens. I do, of course, because personal experience is a lens, but my lens is who I am and I’ve never had to fight for or defend my right to be who I am. I have no particular flag to wave in these matters; I approach everything from the stance of a film historian or as a humanist.

There is a lot of crossdressing and such in giallo, but these are tropes going back to French fin de siècle thrillers of the early 1900s, they don't really have anything to do with homophobia as we perceive it in our time. In the Fantomas novels, Souvestre and Allain (the authors) used to continually deceive their readers by having their characters - the good and the evil ones - change disguises, and sometimes apparently change sexes.

I remember Dario Argento saying that he used homosexual characters in his films because he was interested in their problems. He seldom actually explored their problems, and their portrayal in his earliest films is… quaint, to be kind about it… but it was a positive change as time played out. I think the fact that Argento’s flamboyant style attracted gay fans brought them more into his orbit and the vaguely sinister gay characters of his early films become more three dimensional and sympathetic later on, so in that regard his attention to such characters charts his own gradual embracing of them. So in a sense they chart his own widening embrace of the world, which is surprising considering what a misanthropic view of the world he presents.

THE CHISELER: But Giallo is roughly contemporaneous to the rise of Second Wave Feminism. Like the Michael & Roberta Findlay 'roughies', this is not a fossilized species of extinct male anger we're talking about here. Women's bodies are the energy of pictorial composition; splayed specifically for the delectation of some very confused and pissed off men in the audience. I know of no exceptions. To me it makes perfect sense to recognize the ritualized stabbings, stranglings, the BDSM hijinks in Giallo as rather obvious symptoms of somebody's not-so-latent fear and hatred.

Tim Lucas: I think that’s a modernist attitude that was not all that present at the time. Once the MPAA ratings system was introduced in late 1968, all genres of films got stronger in terms of graphic violence and language, and suspense thrillers were no exception. At the time, women and gay people were feeling freer, freer to be themselves, and were not looking for new ways to be taken out of films, however they might be represented. Neither base really had that power anyway at that time, but at any rate it wasn’t a time for them to appear more conservative. That would come at a later period when they felt more assured and confident in their equality. Throughout the 1960s, even in 1969 films like THE WRECKING CREW and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, you can see that women are still playthings of a sort in films; there are starting to be more honest portrayals of women in films like HUD, but the prevailing emphasis of them is still decorative, so it makes sense that they would be no different in a thriller setting. There’s no arguing, I don’t think, that the murder scenes become more thrilling when the victim is a beautiful, voluptuous woman. It’s nothing to do with misogyny but rather about wanting to induce excitement from the viewer. If you look back to Janet Leigh’s character arc in PSYCHO, the exact same thing happens to her, but because she’s a well-developed character and time is given to explore that character and her goals and motivations, there is no question that it is a role women would want to play, even now. However, the same simply isn’t true of most giallo victims, which should not be seen as one of their rules but as one of their faults. In BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I think Mario Bava shows us just enough of the women characters for us to have some investment in their fates - but when the giallo films are in the hands of sausage makers, you’re going to feel a sense of misogyny. It may be real but it may also be misanthropy or a more commercial mandate to pack more into a film and to sex it up. I should add that, because I’m not a woman or gay, I don’t bring personal sensitivities to these things, so I see them as something that just comes with the territory, like shoot-outs in Westerns. If you were to expunge anything that was objectionable from a giallo film, wouldn’t it be just another cop show or Agatha Christie episode? You watch a giallo film because, on some level, you want to see something with the hope of some emotional or aesthetic involvement, or with the hope of being outraged and offended. There is no end of mystery entertainment without giallo tropes, so it’s there if you demand that. Giallo films aren’t really about who done it, only figuratively; they are lessons in how to stage murder scenes and probably would not exist without the master painting of PSYCHO’s shower scene, which they all seek to emulate.

THE CHISELER: You mentioned Val Lewton earlier. Personally, I've never encountered anything like the overall tone of his films. There's always something startling to see and hear. Would you shed a little light on his importance?

Tim Lucas: He's an almost unique figure in film in that he was a producer yet he projected an auteur-like imprint on all his works. The horror films for which he's best known are not quite like any other films of their kind; I remember Telotte's book DREAMS OF DARKNESS using the word "vesperal" to describe the Lewton films' specific atmosphere - a word pertaining to the mood of evening prayer services, which isn't a bad way of putting it. I've always loved them for their delicacy, their poetical sense, their literary quality, and their indirectness - which sometimes co-exists with sources of florid garishness, like the woman with the maracas in THE LEOPARD MAN. In THE SEVENTH VICTIM, one shy character characterizes the heroine's visit to his apartment as her "advent into his world," and when I first saw it, I was struck by the almost spiritual tenderness and vulnerability of that description. Lewton was remarkable because he seems to have worked in horror because it was below the general studio radar, which allowed him to make extremely personal films. As long as they checked the necessary boxes, he could make the films he wanted - and I think Mario Bava learned that exact lesson from him.

THE CHISELER: I've always been fascinated by a question which is probably unanswerable: Why do you think it is that movies based on Edgar Allan Poe stories — even those films that only just pretend to sink roots in Poe, offering glib riffs on his prose at best — invariably bear fruit?

Tim Lucas: Poe's writings predate the study of human psychology and, to an extent, chart it - so he can be credited with founding a wing of science much like Jules Verne's writings were the foundation of science fiction and, later, science fact. Also, from the little we know of Poe's personal life, his writing was extremely personal and autobiographical, which makes it all the more compelling and resonant. It's also remarkably flexible in the way it lends itself to adaptation - there is straight Poe, comic Poe, arty Poe, even Poeless Poe. It helps too that a lot of people familiar with him haven't read him extensively, at least not since school, or think they have read him because they've seen so many Poe movies. The sheer range of approaches taken to his adaptation makes him that much more universal.

It also occurs to me that people are probably much more alike internally than they are externally, so the identification with an internal or first person narrator may be more immediate. But it's true that his work has inspired a fascinating variety of interpretation. You can see this at work in a single film: SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), which I’ve written an entire book about. It’s three stories done by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini - all vastly different, all terribly personal expressions of the men who made them.

THE CHISELER: Speaking of Poe adaptations, I've long thought it's time to confront Roger Corman's legacy; as an artist, a producer, an industrial muse, everything. Sometimes I think he's the single most important figure in cinema history. And if that's a wild overstatement, I could stand my ground somewhat and point out that no one person ever supported independent filmmakers with such profound results. It's as though he used his position at a mainstream Hollywood studio to open a kind of Underground Railroad for two generations of film artists. He gave so many artists a leg up in a business where those kinds of opportunities were never exactly abundant that it's hard to keep track. Entering the subject from any angle you like, what are your thoughts on Corman's overall contribution to cinema?

Tim Lucas: I can think of more important filmmakers than Corman, but there has never been a more important producer or mogul or facilitator of films. I said this while introducing him on the first of our two-night interview at the St. Louis Film Festival’s Vincentennial in 2011. He was largely responsible for every trend in American cinema during its most decisive quarter century - 1955 through 1980, and to some extent a further decade still, which bore an enormous influx of talent he discovered and nurtured. People talk about Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck, Steven Spielberg, etc. - but their productions don’t begin to show the sheer diversity of interests that you get from Corman’s output. He has no real counterpart. I’ve spent a lot of the past 20 years musing on him, first as the protagonist of a comedy script I wrote with Charlie Largent called THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, which Joe Dante has optioned. A few years ago, I decided to turn the script into a novel, which is with my agent now. It’s about the time period before, during, and after the making of THE TRIP (1966). It's a comedy but one with a serious, even philosophical side.

You know, Mario Bava once described himself to someone as “the Italian Roger Corman.” It’s incredible to me that Bava would have said that, not because it’s wrong or even because he was a total filmmaker before Corman made his first picture, but because Bava has been dead for so long! He’s been gone now almost 40 years and Roger is still making movies. And he’s been making movies for the DTV market longer than anybody, so he sort of predicted the current exodus of new movies away from theaters to streaming formats.

THE CHISELER: Are there any other producers/distributors you'd care to acknowledge, anyone that you think has followed in what you might call Corman’s Tradition of Generosity?

Tim Lucas: No, I really think he is incomparable in that respect. I do think it’s important to note, however, that I doubt Roger was ever purely motivated by generosity of spirit. I don’t think he would put money or his trust in anyone merely as a favor. He’s a businessman to his core and his gambles have always been based on projects that are likely to improve on his investment, even if moderately. I have a feeling that the first dollar he ever made is still in circulation, floating around out there bringing something new into being. I also don’t think he would give anyone their big break unless they had earned that break already in some respect. And when he does extend that opportunity, he’s got to know that, when these people graduate from his company, he’ll be sacrificing their talent, their camaraderie, maybe even in some cases their gratitude. So yes, there is some generosity in that aspect - but he also knows from experience that there are always new top students looking to extend their educations on the job. I wish more people in the film business had his selflessness, his ability to recognize and encourage talent. It may be his greatest legacy.

THE CHISELER: You introduced me, many years ago, to Mill of the Stone Women — I'll end on a personal note by thanking you and asking: Would you share an insight or two about this remarkable gem, particularly for readers who may not have seen it?

Tim Lucas: MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN was probably my first exposure to Italian horror; I saw it as a child, more than once, on local television and there were things about it that haunted and disturbed me, though I didn't understand it. Perhaps that's why it haunted and disturbed me, but the image of Helfy's hands clutching the red velvet curtains stayed with me for decades (a black and white memory) until I got to see it on VHS - I paid $59.95 for the privilege because my video store told me they would not be stocking it. It's a very peculiar film because Giorgio Ferroni wasn't a director who favored horror; the "Flemish Tales" that it's supposedly based on is non-existent, a Lovecraftian meta-invention, and it's the only Italian horror filmed in that particular region in the Netherlands. It looks more Germanic than Italian. I’m tempted to believe Bava may have had a hand in doing the special effects shot, which look like his work, but they might also have been done by his father Eugenio, as he was also a wax figure sculptor so would have been good to have on hand. He seldom took screen credit. So it's a film that has stayed with me because it's elusive; it's hard to find the slot where it belongs. It's like an adult fairy tale, or something out of E.T.A. Hoffmann. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted, trying to find another movie with the unique spell cast by that one.

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