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mel-at-dusk · 4 years

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HOW THE MARASCHINO CHERRY BECAME A COMFORTINGLY TRASHY AMERICAN ICON

Just when did the syrupy, lipstick-red lynchpin of ice cream sundaes, 1970s fruit salads and throwback cocktails conquer the world (and your grandparents’ home bar)?

The cocktail cherry may be small, but it looms like a fiery red planet over the modern history of eating and drinking. Look, there it is, bobbing around in the rust-brown murk of a Manhattan; and, hey, there it is again nestled in the snowy peak of an ice cream sundae, lurking in the syrup-soaked folds of an upended can of fruit salad, or in your parent’s drinking cabinet, languishing in a sticky jar first opened at the dawn of the Clinton administration.

For more than 100 years it’s been the Zelig of the culinary world, beaming out from multiple places it probably shouldn’t be, inviting you to spear one with a cocktail stick, bite down and let your mouth flood with the unmistakable taste of… well, what exactly?

Not actual, fresh cherries, that’s for certain. No, the taste of a cocktail, glacé or ersatz maraschino cherry has nothing to do with the luscious, grape-like subtlety of real stone-fruit. Its impact on the palate — almonds and preservatives and a great, hallucinatory wash of artificial sweetness — is the flavor profile of a cherry as described by a drunken child. Something that, even way back in 1911, was railed against in a New York Times editorial as “a tasteless, indigestible thing, originally, to be sure, a fruit of the cherry tree, but toughened and reduced to the semblance of a formless, gummy lump by long imprisonment in a bottle filled with so-called maraschino.”

And yet, even though this resistance to the gloopy, synthesized commercialism those little red globules represent is at least a century old, the cocktail cherry abides as a cultural artifact. Not just in the post-Mad Men context of master mixologists hoarding artisanal Luxardo cherries or producing their own housemade varieties, but in studiedly kitsch, revivalist dessert parlors like New York’s Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream; and even, scattered throughout Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, garnishing the industrial-strength whiskey sours of one Rick “Fucking” Dalton.

“When you see a bright red one now, it’s like a bartender with a waxed moustache and sleeve garters,” notes Jared Brown, drinks historian and master distiller with venerated British gin brand Sipsmith. “It’s no longer just itself. It’s nostalgia and irony and humor.”

So how does something so ridiculous and occasionally reviled come to have such durable appeal? How the hell are they even made? And what, exactly, do bitter food standardization wars, embalming fluids and carcinogenic food dyes have to do with it?

Well, pour yourself a stiff Mai Tai, crown it with what may be your final ever cocktail cherry, and let’s chart the turbulent life, near-death and eventual resurrection of a near-indestructible American icon.

As with most convenience foods, the cocktail cherry story starts out innocently enough. Cherries stretch back to the prehistory of Europe and West Asia, and pretty much since that time, they’ve been notorious as the frail divas of the produce aisle — difficult to transport, susceptible to bruising and known to liquefy without refrigeration. And so, innovative orchard owners in the early 1800s — most notably the Croatian-born, Italian-based Luxardo family — started preserving at-their-peak cherries, both as an alcoholic liqueur and steeped in a boozy brine made up of mulched cherries, pits and sugar.

This was the Big Bang that gave us the maraschino, named for the sour, Marasca cherry variety that Luxardo made their own. It wasn’t long until these pickled fruits were infiltrating the U.S. as part of the wider mania for cocktails in the mid-to-late 19th century. (The original 1888 recipe for the martini, as Brown notes, called for a “cherry rather than an olive.”) But soon, that original, burgundy-hued Luxardo maraschino was joined by a whole Rothko color wheel of lurid U.S.-made knock-offs, soaked in cheaper preserving syrups.

One reason for this was pure cosmetics. “The first taste is with the eye, and in the days before social media, the maraschino cherry offered a huge visual bounce,” notes Brown. “Think of it resting in the brown tone of a Manhattan — it’s like a bright red beacon in the drink. [And so,] there was a need to get it as brightly colored as possible.”

Yet it’s also notable that the maraschino cherry’s turn-of-the-century ascendancy also coincided with the wider vogue for lab-made dyes, flavorings and additives that flourished in the pre-FDA era. (Relevant: This was also a time when, at the behest of nervous dairy farmers, margarine had to literally be dyed pink in some states to broadcast the fact it wasn’t butter.) “For many years, I’ve asked audiences at tasting events what maraschino cherries, grenadine and sloe gin have in common,” says Brown. “And the answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing! And yet, go back to my childhood and they were all the same color and flavor because they came from the same lab.”

Throw in the arrival of Prohibition in 1920, and the fact it meant fruit could no longer be preserved in alcohol, and other brining methods needed to be found. It was a team of Oregon-based scientists who, after more than five years of experimentation, realized that calcium salts could preserve the Northwest’s seasonal glut of fresh cherries, and also help them retain their firmness. What’s more, in the 1930s, this same team realized that if you bleached the cherries and then dyed them red (or green, or even, occasionally, electric blue) the vivid pop of color would be even more pronounced. At this point, the American “maraschino” — leached of its natural color, embalmed in synthetic preservative and flavored with almond-derived benzaldehyde — had mutated into something only tenuously related to its European forbearer.

The original maraschino farmers in Italy were — if you can believe this — not crazy about American producers using their name to hawk cloying, cherry-shaped candies the color of antifreeze. But by 1940, they had lost a long-stewing food standardization battle, when the FDA decreed that the name “maraschino” had now evolved beyond its original meaning and, to most Americans, meant the artificially flavored neon red scourge of the Luxardo family.

And so, in the wake of World War II, the cocktail cherry’s cultural dominance truly began; slotting into an additive-laced mid-century food landscape, they gleamed from Betty Crocker cake recipes, adorned every other drink at a newly established 1950s Tiki bar chain called Trader Vic’s, and even, come 1978, gave their name to a hardcore adult film called Maraschino Cherry. “I remember adoring them,” says Brown, recalling his 1970s childhood in upstate New York. “There was nothing better, when we were out at a restaurant, than getting a cherry on a little plastic cocktail sword.”

If anything they were even more adored in the U.K., where a collective, post-rationing proclivity for all things sweet only added to their appeal. Eccentric TV chef Fanny Cradock would place them on the top of troublingly phallic “banana candle” party concoctions, and in Only Fools and Horses — a beloved, long-running BBC One sitcom about a family of luckless grifters living in South London — it became synonymous with main character Del Boy and his fondness for gaudy drinks that represented a tacky sort of sophistication. Even when I was growing up in 1990s London, my parents — first-generation Nigerians who rarely drank — would always have a glowing container of what we knew as glacé cherries beside a long-opened bottle of brandy.

“You can’t underestimate the power of a good garnish,” laughs Alice Lascelles, drinks writer and author of Ten Cocktails: The Art of Convivial Drinking. “That Day-Glo cherry is something I associate very strongly with childhood and the idea of a grown-up drink, a celebratory drink.” This mixture of childishness — of innocence — and a more adult glamor seems to be at the heart of the cocktail cherry’s appeal throughout this period toward the end of the last century; they’re fruit with all the subtlety and unpredictability chemically extracted, an unapologetic hit of trashiness that appeals to both Chuck E. Cheese birthday party attendees and the kind of chain-smoking bar flies we all sat two stools from long before social-distancing measures required it.

But, of course, the cocktail cherry party came to an abrupt halt later in the 1980s. Partly, this may have been lingering scares over the occasional use of Red Dye Number 4 — a chemical colorant with some links to cancer in animal trials — in some preserved cherries, permitted because they were deemed to be “decorative” rather than a foodstuff. Also: There were unfounded rumors about formaldehyde being used as a preservative which, perhaps fittingly, just wouldn’t die.

Mostly, though, their waning was linked to the demise of the movement that first popularized them in the U.S. “The maraschino cherry collapsed precipitously along with the collapse of cocktails,” says Brown. “Suddenly, you weren’t finding anyone over the age of 10 lunging toward maraschino cherries, and what happened was people discovered wine, which eventually went into craft beer.”

At that point, in terms of the popular consciousness, cocktail cherries were mostly glimpsed at the fringes of culture, or within insalubrious bars with “C” hygiene ratings tacked to their windows. Then, inevitably, as the cocktail revival of the mid-2000s began in coastal cities, sailor-tattooed mixologists started looking into what preceded the neon cocktail cherries of their youth, and eventually rediscovered Luxardo’s original, burgundy-colored and naturally sweetened maraschinos.

“I remember I’d race [Milk & Honey founder and bartender] Sasha Petrosky and Audrey Saunders [of the Pegu Club] to a place called Dean & Deluca because it was the only place you could buy Luxardo maraschino cherries in New York,” recalls Brown about the frenzy during the craft cocktail boom. “It didn’t matter which one of us got there first; we would end up [dividing] them out until the next shipment.” Now, Brown reports, Luxardo is sending “palette-loads a week over” for import and he himself preserves around 200 jars of maraschino-style cherries a year to sell from his home in the English countryside. In 2017, Luxardo planted 2,000 new Marasca cherry trees in Northern Italy — taking their total to 30,000 — just to keep pace with demand.

The pendulum, after all those years of traffic light-red candied cherries, has swung back to something purer again. Yet, interestingly, the unnatural cocktail varieties haven’t disappeared. They’ve had their own rebirth, whether crowning old school cocktails at acclaimed, 1960s-inspired Detroit bar Hammer and Nail, or clogging social media feeds as part of author Anna Pallai’s Twitter account-turned-campy-coffee-table-hit 70s Dinner Party. “There’s a definite trend for kitsch that’s brought them back,” says Lascelles. “Instagram has helped as well, because they really pop in a picture.”

It makes sense that the current, extremely online moment — where almost everything can be both completely sincere and larded in multiple confusing layers of irony — would be the time when both these diametrically opposed approaches to cherry preservation would find room to flourish. They are, as Brown notes, “jubilant and ebullient at a time when humor and fun is something we are all desperate for.” It seems as plain as the unearthly red glow, beaming from the bottom of a filled coupe glass in the corner. Like that opened jar in your parents’ home bar, the cocktail cherry isn’t going anywhere.

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stormxpadme · 2 years

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How I made peace with my favorite franchises getting fucked over

I talked about this to @effervescentdragon and it was kind of an epiphany, so I felt like sharing, because maybe someone else feels the same and can use a few positive thoughts.

With Hollywood running out of ideas respectively courage, a very specific generation of fandom is facing a renaissance recently. If you are a dinosaur like me and were online from the moment, internet went big, if you were part of the first big online fandom spaces from ca. 2000 on, chances are good you’ve been feeling like you’ve used the TARDIS in the last few years a couple of times and were stuck in it for good in the last few months.

I think it started, for me … Well, with MCU still being one of the major franchises these days, let’s not forget that the first huge superhero online fandom grew around 2000 with what was - along with the first two Maguire Spider-Man-movies - one of the first excellent big screen comic adaptions, X-Men. So this process of rehashing geek icons of the last, say, 30 years, at least for me already started a few years back when they tried to save the old X-Men movie series, including not only a timeline that was supposed to fix what X-Men: The Last Stand fucked up but also some of the original actors.

Well, turns out that was only the beginning, doesn’t it? In the last couple of years and especially months, we have seen the original 3 Jurassic Park icons return and Keanu and Carrie-Anne return for Matrix. We have Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen teaming up for a series set in an era that - surprise, surprise - people don’t hate half as much as the dudebros wanted to make you believe around 2005. We have a Star Trek series that put a closure to one secretly beloved character like Wesley Crusher, who is - not least thanks to his nerdy and mental health advocate actor being very active on social media - also not half as hated as everyone thought. And reviving the rest of the old crew is coming up in the next season of Picard. We had Jamie Lee Curtis returning for Halloween and Neve Campbell and the rest of the original actors once more returning for a Scream movie. Not to mention MCU hogging those Spider-Mans and even the original Professor X now.

And a couple of days ago, the bomb was dropped that what’s probably one of the most beloved Doctors aka Tennant will return for a special with his companion.

I don’t know how you guys feel, but a geek of my generation (proud Xennial, born ‘82, bullied for 8 years straight in school so I had nothing but movies and series), I’ve been getting whiplash lately.

Here’s the thing: Most of these franchises I just mentioned that I’m in have let me down beyond belief. Some of them more than once.

X-Men: The Last Stand was the first major disappointment I ever had with a franchise I loved. The new movies couldn’t save that for me.

Star Wars died for me the moment they killed the old EU. I gave the new movies a chance. They sucked for me.

I stopped watching Star Trek mid-Voyager, and my interest as a whole not least dropped because of how they treated Wesley in Star Trek: Nemesis. I’m okay with the new movies but nothing I hear about the new series had hooked me up so far.

I still haven’t watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom because boy, did I not think they could make it any worse after Jurassic Park III but holy shit, is Chris Pratt annoying in this reboot.

After Avengers: Age of Ultron happened, I had to leave tumblr. I simply couldn’t deal with fandom anymore, with all tags and my dash filled with stuff I hated. I only watched MCU movies when I had to watch them for my magazine. And just to be very clear, I’ve been such a die-hard MCU fan, I paid a lot of money in 2014 to go to SDCC just for that experience. And I still haven’t been able to get myself to watch Hawkeye and Black Widow. I was hurt too much over those characters.

So what I’m trying to say is: I should be feeling anxious as fuck right now, with that rehash process going on and on. Eru knows I have been for far too long.

Like, when I get my hopes up for a beloved franchise too much, usually things like the The Hobbit-movies happen that I can’t watch unless I’m drunk enough to deal with them, or a franchise goes downhill so unbelievably quickly, like in the moment when they let Joss Whedon take the first pen for Age of Ultron in his sexist little hands. It always felt like whenever I loved something too much, it was doomed to go to shit.

I was already torn between being devastated and so fucking EXCITED when they rebooted the X-Men movie series back then. Especially when it was clear Patrick, Hugh and then Famke and James were coming back. What can I say? They managed to turn me away from the new movies as well. It is beyond me how you can fuck up a brilliant story like the Dark Phoenix saga two times in a row.

At this point, I don’t even expect Hollywood to do anything but fuck it up further when they try to fix things using elements people used to love.

So when news broke about that new Obi-Wan series and Hayden, I should have been fucking GUTTED. Star Wars was one of the best times of my life. My eating disorder was doing okay, I had several expensive, beautiful cosplays and at the Revenge of the Sith premier, I met George Lucas and Hayden and was told by them, my AOTC Pastel Lake Dress was beautiful. I love the PT, unashamed and unironically, and everyone can suck my ladyballs about that. And now they got Ewan and my boy back and JFC, I should just be shutting my internet down, now that the promo has started and I’m beginning to see this everywhere.

And here I am sitting, realizing, quite amazed ... I no longer care.

After The Hobbit-movies, I think it was, I decided something very important for myself. I don’t need to accept the official canon. Just because I’m a fan of something, doesn’t mean I have to be a fan of each and every aspect. I don't need to watch/read the parts I hate. In fandom online spaces, I don’t need to follow people posting about these things, and I can use extensive blacklists. I can leave conversations when they’re about aspects of franchises that I don’t like. I’ve never been someone who tries to spoil other’s fun of something I hate. So if a place is not for me, I can just go.

I didn’t realize how liberating that was until like, 2015. Until that point, canon had always been a mandatory fact for me. That’s coming a lot, I think, from having been a fanfiction writer for 30 years. When I started publishing online, canon purists were still far more common. Your stories were far more likely to be widely ignored and even dragged if you didn’t stick to canon accurately. With time, I found that I’m a niche author anyway, and the stuff I write won’t appeal to more or less people, just because I force myself to acknowledge parts of canon I hate.

So I started slapping “verse: movie(s) x exclusively” on my stories and started to just fucking ignore what I didn’t like. And after I while I realized, I didn’t need to limit that approach to fanfiction. Time is far too short and too precious to waste it with consuming media I know I won’t like.

So what I do is when something like Wesley’s return or cameos of my favorite characters in franchise incarnations I hate happen these days is: I wait. I’m not in a hurry. I don’t need to write reviews the moment these things are out. I can lean back and wait until my anxiety issues allow for a new piece of media to consume. In the meantime, I read up what they did with elements I love so much. When I feel I can stomach seeing them and/or if the new incarnation actually FIXES something for once, I’ll watch either just the scenes in question or maybe even catch up with some other franchise installations I missed.

Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Like. The X-Men timeline is far too fucked up to repair that canon in any way, not least because of the Logan movie. I might as well give Picard a chance soon though, because watching that Wesley scene (and reading Wil’s thoughts about the whole process), for the first time in a long while, I had a feeling we're dealing with writers here who actually UNDERSTAND. I’ll probably watch the Obi-Wan series, but I already know there is no way this is going in “my” verse since it’s new EU. But I might enjoy it anyway.

So every now and then, I’ll visit current installations of my favorite franchises, and every now and then I might even like them. Might even incorporate them in my own verse in one or the other way (if nothing else, usually faceclaims and/or other material for graphics and videos is the least I can get out of new installations like that; we do NOT talk about Days of Future Past though, because how they managed to fuck up things like Scott's glasses like that is beyond my wildest imagination).

Sometimes, canon surprisingly kind of fixes itself in a satisfying way, like in MCU where they now introduced multiverse and everyone feeling like me can just pretend we’re back in Winter Soldier and nothing coming after that happened in canon, because there’s millions of canons now. Seriously, multiverse is the best that can happen to a writer and a broken fan heart.

I’ve had people tell me “BUT YOU CAN’T DO THAT, YOU HAVE TO CONSUME AND TAKE CANON LIKE IT IS, EVERYTHING ELSE IS DISRESPECTFUL TO THE WRITERS” and I’m like. What? Gonna cry? Gonna shoot me or something? What fucking business of yours is it how I consume my media? I’m not posting hate in character tags, I leave conversations when fans of things I hate are around, I label all my fanfics clearly enough to not steal any reader’s time.

Fanart is not always but very often fixing the canon reality you don’t want to deal with. And for me, that saved my whole fandom experience.

Gosh it feels GOOD, finally no longer giving a fuck.

TL;dr: As my dear effervescentdragon said: "if i dont like it it didnt happen, xoxo, fuck off"

Seriously. It will give you so much peace.

#misc stuff #that made me stop scrolling #personal #writing #star wars #phallic glow sticks and cheese #star trek #my love before I was old enough to turn on the tv #MCU #the one that let me down harder than my first boyfriend #lord of the rings #and all tolkien lore #dysfunctional elves ftw #x men #everything after x2 didn't happen sue me #x men original timeline movies

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stormxpadme · 2 years

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Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favourite five fics that you've written, then pass it to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💖

These are always torture for persons with the self-confidence of a lemming, but I’ll give it a shot because I also love talking about my writing. No, there’s no logic in it. Yes, I’m a human disaster. So, in no particular order.

Tales Untold: IN BETWEEN (#11) (The Lord of the Rings)

In Between is arguably the height of the Stewardaides Crisis that shakes Aragorn’s rule post-Ring War. It’s part of one of my longest fanfiction series, and while with series-projects, I am always inclined to like the last part best ... Emotionally and technically, this is, I think, the one that stands out. One by one, plot details are being revealed that there has been foreshadowing for ever since part 1 of the series. With three of the protagonists in captivity and in mortal danger, the stakes are obviously high enough, but there’s also a lot of emotional development going on with Legolas and his father finally working through some issues and Aragorn and Legolas finally settling a terrible fight that has been going on for four series parts at that point. This is the one that brings peace to Ithilien and Legolas’ canonical settlement there, it’s breathing life into the post Ring War era and develops Aragorn’s and Legolas’ friendship. It’s also as a milestone regarding Legolas’ canonically neglected characterization, and if I am to use the word proud about any of my writing which I am very hesitant to, this would probably win the prize.

24/7 (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

24/7 statistically is the most successful of my fanfics in our German archive (where I have published about 130 stories of the hundreds of fanfics I wrote in my 30 years of writing). That is, in part, because this was probably the only time I was, as an author in the right place at the right time. In 2013, I loved the MCU as much as I came to hate it these days, and so did millions of other people, and my main ship for once was quite popular as well. Therefore, I somehow managed to attract a lot of attention with 24/7, in spite of experimenting with a writing style I am not usually comfortable with: Writing in present tense. The idea for 24/7 was inspired by the concept of the 24 series. There was a chapter for every hour of a day that Natasha spent by Clint’s bedside after he’s been shot and is on the brink of death, shortly after the events of the The Avengers-movie. While Bruce is fighting for Clint’s life and the other three team members are trying to comfort Natasha, she recollects her time with Clint from their first meeting to this day in flashbacks. Each chapter is divided in the present events and a section of their past. The whole project was technically very demanding but it also takes a huge emotional toll. With everything I hate about MCU this days, this one is for the canon avoiders who refuse to believe anything after Winter Soldier happened and are entirely happy with the Avengers living as a functional, loving team in Tony’s tower. It’s a love story both to what the MCU could have been and about Clint’s and Natasha’s relationship that will never be conventional and can only end in tragedy one day, but it’s also about them realizing that until that happens, they need to make the best of every day. From the technical requirements alone, I think, this is one of my better works.

All Or Nothing: CAN'T LET IT GO (#3) (American Idol RPF)

All Or Nothing is a series about my waning love for casting shows, about everything I used to love about them before the concept became stale recently. It’s less an RPF than a self-insert as the female protagonist has a lot of details from my own life and experiences. While some former judges and media members of the German version of American Idol exist in ths, as well as cameos of people like Alanis Morissette, LeAnn Rimes, Roxette and Kurt Nilsen, the story is mostly a classic romance with lots and lots and lots of my favorite music involved. It contains my experiences at my own American Idol castings as well as my experiences with managing a German rock musician for a while and pulls no punches regarding the deadly sides of showbiz. One contestant in this fictional season of (German) American Idol dies in a depression-induced accident while my protagonist slips into pill addiction in the course of the series to handle the pressure. The relationship between her and future German Idol winner JC especially in this series part is put to the ultimate test after the death of that contestant who used to be JC’s best friend, and when another contestant outs Vic’s and JC’s so far secret relationship to the media, a gigantic shitstorm breaks loose. I think it’s mostly how the protagonists hold on to their performances, to the music they love so much, to save their sanity, what makes me love this so much. When Vic performs songs like May it be and Into the west for their deceased friend in the show and the whole studio is crying, this is what I used to dream of myself as a kid (until it became clear I’m a shitty singer, oh well). Probably more a personal favorite of mine than a masterpiece, but that’s what this list is also for, no?

Weathered I: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE (#9) (X-Men original timeline movieverse)

With me editing and continuing the two Weathered series right now, this can’t be missing of course. While two of the stories mentioned so far are love letters to their respective canon, this is a declaration of war. This is rage. This is my whole disappointment that came with X-Men: The Last Stand and the new movies including Dark Phoenix, too, after I fell in love so damn deeply with X-Men and X2 at the time. So what I did here was build my own canon in that verse, with the ships I prefer (Jean and Logan IMO just have so much better chemistry in the movies, and I ship Scott with happiness, sorry not sorry), and then ruined it to the ground with tragedy, by finally giving those original movie characters the Dark Phoenix saga they deserve. For Better Or For Worse is set some months after X2 and finds the X-Men devastated and highly confused after Jean just returned from the dead only to set all of New York on fire and then fuck off to space in the shape of a gigantic flaming bird. With Charles revealing to them what he’s long suspected, that an alien all-powerful demon named Phoenix has taken possession of Jean, the X-Men venture on their greatest adventure yet to find Jean and try to separate her from the demon to stop it and save Jean’s life, before Dark Phoenix will destroy all life in the universe. While it does of course have my own ideas, this Dark Phoenix saga version is inspired a lot by the X-Men cartoon version, including the final battle on a piece of rock and resurrection in the shape of all team members giving part of their gift to save Jean. It’s not even a horribly complicated story, and it is beyond me how Hollywood managed to fuck that up two times in a row. So I just had to grab my imaginary Infinity Gauntlet and do it on my own. And holy shit, did I have a lot of fun with it. I incorporated not only the cartoon but many of my favorite Marvel elements that I used to love as a kid in this. The Defenders of the Earth from that old cartoon are the ones that get the honor to take the X-Men to space. Charles gets to fight his once-every-few-years-girlfriend Lilandra to stop a whole alien race from just killing Jean’s ass off cold. We get Logan discovering part of his past and his real name and Remy and Marie beginning their relationship amidst tragedy. Every scene is sadness and pain and also character development, and there’s nothing less but the whole universe at stake. Sometimes when I reread this, I get the feeling, maybe I don’t suck as much as I think at least two times a day as a writer.

Crossing Lines: INFINITE SADNESS (#6) (Star Wars)

This, funnily enough, wasn’t meant to be war, because when I wrote the Crossing Lines-series, things were dead in the Star Wars-universe. I am not kidding you younglings. Everyone at that point was convinced, we would never see another installment of that franchise. Good ol’ times, kiddos. Turns out, in the year 2022, this is another unintended gigantic middle finger to canon, though. Crossing Lines gave Obi-Wan the depth he did not have in the first six movies by having him doubt some aspects of the Jedi Code when he falls in love. Since his indoctrination by the Order has progressed too deeply though, he can’t progress on this far healthier way of a Grey Jedi quickly enough before Order 66 leaves the order and the galaxy in ruins. So in this last part of the series, his girlfriend in the order ends up in her own exile where she has Obi-Wan’s baby and gives it away for their own safety. No, absolutely fucking no one in this series is having fun at all, not once (well except for in a couple of sex scenes). Infinite sadness is one of the oldest stories on this list, and especially style-wise, it would need a major makeover, but it nailed the characterization of those movie characters who, as far as I am concerned, have officially nothing more than six movies on them, and I still get back reading it occasionally fondly.

****

A honorary mention goes out to an as of yet unpublished story on my hard drive called Terra Exit: MY WORLDCHANGER (ignore the series name, it’s a stub), which is the beginning of something I will probably write when I’m retired one day, because I won’t have time before. It’s my attempt of turning the old She-Ra: Princess of Power series into a written project for grown-ups. While the first few series parts will follow and loosely incorporate the She-Ra series episodes, before the fanfiction series moves on to full-fledged war between She-Ra and Hordak on Etheria and then ends in an apocalyptic showdown, with She-Ra and He-Man against Horde Prime and Skeletor on Eternia ... Well, you can already tell by that description, this is no longer a children’s cartoon. This is turning the already very mature and political themes that the old series touched, like sacrifice, social injustice and tyranny, into basically a graphic horror novel. This will have death and gore, sex scenes and references to child abuse, violence and loss. My Worldchanger is marking the beginning of that, putting the events of the The Secret of the Sword cartoon movie into writing, including Adora finding out about having been stolen from her parents as a child and being transformed not least by mind control spells into a warlord for the enemy, about having a twin brother and a superpowered secret identity, it’s about her meeting her parents on her home world and making the ultimate sacrifice of not living with them but fighting against her old abductors and abusers on Etheria until the planet is free. This was originally meant also as a gigantic fuck you about everything the new She-Ra series (great as its LGBT+ representation is) fucked up about the original, but like 20 pages in I realized ... Fuck. This has fucking potential. It will probably be like 5 million words long by the time it’s finished, and no one will ever read it but you know what? I can live with that. I’ll probably take it with me to the grave and still be proud of it.

#x men #everything after x2 didn't happen sue me #x men original timeline movies #star wars #phallic glow sticks and cheese #MCU #the one that let me down harder than my first boyfriend #lord of the rings #and all tolkien lore #dysfunctional elves ftw #clintasha #the ultimate betrayal #fanfiction #sometimes stormy gets asked things #effervescentdragon #thank you luv <3 #writing

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stormxpadme · 2 years

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OKAY OKAY this is gonna be a lot bcs theres some real good questions here and we never talked about these i think and i wanna knooooow :D 5, 8, 9, 26, 33, 38. :D <3

Yet another writing ask - Send me numbers!

5 - What's a tag you never want to use for your works even when it applies?

Can’t really think of any I wouldn’t use because I don’t like them, but you’d be hard pressed to find something tagged “fluff” in my works, I think. I am physically unable to write fluff. I tried for 30 years. Even when there’s fun and romance happening, I need at least a little bit of drama in it. So. Not gonna happen. Guess I just got a black, black soul.

8 - How slow is a slow burn?

Between 50,000 and 100,000 words, usually. The ultimate endgame can take up to 400,000 words. Like. Annika and Karl had a BDSM quicky in the first chapter but didn’t start their relationship until 100,000 words in. And then broke up three more times until the wedding after 400,000 words. Ilya and Legolas in theory were a couple about 100,000 words in but met like 5 times between T.A. 3000 and the War of the Ring and only got married afterwards. Which was like another 200,000 words later. Scott and Katja were a thing about 50,000 words in, broke up one time for some 100,000 words or so and got married another 400,000 words after their first kiss. My Glorestor probably take the cake though, with casual sex for two Ages and only starting an actual relationship in Fourth Age Aman, which is roughly a million words and about 5,000 years between their first meeting and getting married. No, my couples are never in a hurry on the emotional side, thanks for asking.

9 - Thoughts on cliffhangers.

I love cliffhangers, I’m just trying not to overdo it because it tends to get a cheap effect after a while. More often than not, I do not really have a choice though when a chapter would simply be too long if I added the next scene. So I don’t always deserve it when readers yell at me. I will admit though that it was maybe a little evil to end one Tales Untold series part with Legolas poisoned and chained up in Emyn Arnen and Aragorn and Arwen trapped in an enemy base ...

26 - What would you describe as OOC?

OOC depends a lot on circumstance and setting, on precondition. Before I can judge someone’s writing of canon characters, I need to know where we stand with them. In big franchises, which parts of it does the author use? At which point of the canon timeline are we? Do I, as the reader, know each and every detail of the franchise so I can even judge if the author is judging the characters correctly? Is the whole thing an AU? An AU has different rules altogether, I guess, that’s one of the reasons why I rarely read them though. If it’s not an AU and the former is the case, next step is exposition. An author can sell me a lot if they actually do that instead of just letting things happen. If their story explains in detail and reasonably why a character is not acting in a way we have seen them act in canon, it’s not out of character for said person in the context of the fic. If said character acts out of order at the very beginning of the story and the explanation follows later, an author’s note about that would be helpful, otherwise it’s possible, I won’t read on. If the story captured me at this point and there’s a note that things will be explained, I’ll probably still give it a go. But if an author start their fic with, like, the Witch-king deciding this has all been a big misunderstanding and proposing to Éowyn with a big bouquet in the middle of the battle before Aragorn weds them Barbossa-style from the other side of the field ... Don’t get me wrong, I’ll probably ask you to give me some of the stuff you had before coming up with that because that must be some good shit, but it’s not necessarily something I want to read.

33 - Give your writing a compliment.

I’m stubborn to the point of self-mutilation.

38 - "This never happened" fix-it fics or "this happened but" fix-it fics?

I think that applies more to my settings than my fics? Too many of my main franchises have let me down. So if I still write for them, I write explicitely only for the parts I like and are therefore my personal canon. My tags and author notes will explicitely state in which kind of verse these fics are set in so readers know what to expect. My X-Men movie official canon ends with X2. My Star Wars canon includes six movies and the old EU. Everything after Captain America: The Winter Soldier never happened in my MCU. This is how I prefer to fix my verses, because when a franchise lets me down, it lets me down too hard to fix this with anything I can do with fic. When there’s smaller stuff I don’t like about canon, I do prefer the “this happened but”-approach though, I think. Like, in my verse, of course Haldir got his stupid ass axed in Helm’s Deep but poor guy definitely just passed out and got healed then, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

#lord of the rings #and all tolkien lore #dysfunctional elves ftw #fanfiction #stormys fanfics #sometimes stormy gets asked things #effervescentdragon #thanks luv #you know for what #MCU #the one that let me down harder than my first boyfriend #x men #everything after x2 didn't happen sue me #star wars #phallic glow sticks and cheese #x men original timeline movies

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stormxpadme · 4 years

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Levity - Naboo skies? 💚

Oh, my heart *clutches chest*.

So.

Aside from almost 30 years of fanfiction, I have also published 3 books. Technically, the Star Wars: Levity-series is among them.

I wrote that fanfiction pilot and part 1 of that fanfiction series many years ago, before my attention drifted of for some time. In that time, I started working for a publishing house and we wanted to add stuff of mine to our program. Since we were looking for a Science-Fiction-series anyway, I agreed to rewrite Levity into an original work. But truth is that I was never fully happy with how that turned out. The whole thing just works way better as a fanfiction series. Since that project fell apart when I left the publishing house anyway, what I’m gonna do is see how I can change the whole thing back into the fanfiction version without hurting my own copyright *cough* and without getting in trouble with the publishing house, and then I’ll continue where I left off.

Levity is what I personally always called Firefly in a Galaxy far, far away. It’s set between Star Wars Episode III and VI and was written long before the new Star Wars-movies, thus ignoring them. It revolves around a bunch of social misfits/freelancers who try to fly below the Empire’s radar and save Force users from the empire and bring them to a save heaven in the outer rim, all for money. They want to do good but they also really like their buck. Among them are an ex-starship captain of the Empire, a Nautolan Jedi, a nymphomaniac and a robot.

I just love this whole premise to the moon and back and I really want to give it another shot.

Someday.

"If we all stay silent, we won't change anything about the suffering in this galaxy." The youngest girl, barely twelve years old, was the next one to speak up. “The Jedi's job is to protect the galaxy. My master always said that. And he heard it from the council ... "

"Are you saying that you know better?" Ylana asked in challenge. "That we should forget about everything we have learned in the temple?"

Irsil sighed deeply. She hadn't imagined it to be that difficult. “It's not my job to make people like Yoda or Kenobi look like idiots. They’re perfectly able to do that themselves. I'm just here to save your ass. That none of you can even feel that you're in danger is what worries me most. In the little time you spent here, you have already made enemies who will stop at nothing.“

#fanfiction #stormys fanfics #8lottie8 #star wars #phallic glow sticks and cheese #sometimes stormy gets asked things

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