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[This post contains no substantial spoilers for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. It does contain spoilers for next to normal.]

Last month two of my friends hosted a 'Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice' marathon, where we first watched the original movie, then a boot of the musical (which is the only installment I'd previously seen, when its tour came around to Buffalo and my aunt chanced into some tickets), and then went to the local theater to watch the new sequel, and since then I've continued to spend a fair bit of time thinking about the franchise.

There are two things that stand out to me about the musical.


One, most of the content is really just a vessel for spectacle. I mean that approvingly! I got choked up seeing the 'Day-o' song live, because there's something really moving to me about a bunch of people coming together to put on something that competently silly. Precise and unnatural body language acting is enrichment in my enclosure. I recently saw The Terminator for the first time; the movements of people pretending to be robots and possessed people provide me with similar entertainment-vitamins. The songs are fine and well and good, and I do like them! But they're primarily here so that you can see a giant snake-worm puppet, or a guy break a ukulele in half and perfectly catch a thrown replacement five seconds later, or, yeah, the 'Day-o' song in its entirety.


Two... I think I also mean this approvingly, but a lot of the things that are good about this show are copied from other shows. I guess if I were going to frame it approvingly, I would say that you can really see the DNA of other musicals in this one. There's an amount of The Addams Family here, naturally ("Oh, and Full Disclosure: it's a show about death!", and the whole yellow dress plot element). 'No Reason' has a lot of Heathers's 'Shine a Light' in it, especially with how Delia slides into making her message to Lydia about herself instead.

(Sidenote: I do think it's kind of funny that, although real-life Delias are fully wrong about the sort of thing this song is about, Delia herself is a bit more right? Like, ghosts are real in this world; souls are real in this world—there's a lot more basis for saying that the universe is "random for a reason"!)

And the most notable DNA strand, to me, is next to normal. I think because it's the one that's the most thematic, rather than momentary, and also it didn't really need to be here at all? I definitely noticed the lack of dead-mom plot in the original movie, and the sequel goes so far as to directly call out that Lydia's mom was not actually dead there! Here, it's the whole emotional core, and the central conflict of 'Dad never wants to talk about the dead family member or address them by name, which is the main cause of the family's strife' is lifted pretty directly. I don't mean to criticize it! I think it's executed strongly and I do liek if u cri erytiem.  Just, they absolutely did not need to do this, and did.


Which brings me to the actual reason I wanted to write this post, even though it wouldn't have warranted one on its own:  I kind of get the impression that the naming thing is a worldbuilding element?  Like, you could definitely say that it's just thematic; they were just copying next to normal and the reason they did that is because it would be sparkly to expand the narrative importance of saying a certain demon's name three times.  You could also say it's just Lydia being a weird little girl; that it's important to her in particular but not really anyone else (which is just a change they made to justify the dramatic weight).  But the impression I get, is that, yeah, names being an important thing in the Netherworld had consequences!  Living people clearly ever interact with it, and so it leaked into their society, too.  Being willing to say someone's name has not just mystical significance in narrow situations, but an amount of social significance, all the time.

And I think that's neat.  Having a land of the dead would have effects on the rest of the world, and Delia is more right than Lydia knows.

Question from here!

break: What would cause your OC to break down completely? What do they look like when that happens? Has anyone ever seen them at their lowest?

Ancora
This is very obviously referring to an emotional break / BSOD type of thing, but to start with:  in the universe where daeva are a little more destructible Ancora would be having a bad time.  Judy successfully killing Cam and then busting all their art objects in Milliways would be a pretty severe hit to their overall magic/consciousness supply but would not, I think, kill them outright.  The overall number of vampires being appropriately gothy on earth is just too high.  And in fact in order to go full "mote of misery and unfulfillment" I do think every vampire needs to be dead and every sangrade needs to be out of magic.  (It takes way less than that to forcibly teleport them back to the forelti realm with no immediate way to leave it.)

As for emotional breaks - I think they're honestly pretty close to there in dark precipice?  They had to go do a couple days of sad music when they got let back into the bar; their faith in their ability to comprehend let alone help humans is pretty broken and they're only trying because they strongly feel that the way things are is unacceptable and they're the only one who can change it.  It's a thread full of sads of every gender.

The 'what do they look like' bit is interesting for Ancora specifically - obviously a lot of it depends on how people around them are acting and how much emotive skill they've picked up.  Aside from the specifics of dark precipice, I think they're generically likely to remodel themself a new outfit, do a lot of sad music, and, in situations where they aren't of the impression that all weather displays are scary to humans, literally make it rain/thunderstorm/snowstorm/etc.

So I've been listening to The Shadow Lover. I have no intention of sticking to any sort of schedule and I might start doing this with other books as well in between these as the mood strikes me, but for various reasons I've been really liking the idea of reading something and posting chapter-by-chapter reactions, instead of the very quotespastey, rapidfire way I usually tend to. (Not least because Swimmer isn't in my channel and trying to liveblog in more public places is generally not something I succeed at. Or, I suppose this is fully public but it's also very much my space so that's about the same.)

I'm starting this past midnight on a bit of a whim so even to the extent that it might already take me longer to read it than it took to write it the next one might be a while. I do intend to finish it someday but time will tell whether that's within the next decade.

A little background: ASFTV stands for A Song For Two Voices. It's a rationalfic of the The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey. I've read a fair bit of Swimmer's glowfic, but most of it was a couple years ago so I'm not entirely fresh. While I've never read any Valdemar stuff, I did read the first two books of Lackey's The Mage Wars series a few times in high school, which are a far prequel. (It's too 1am for me to confirm but from glowfic memory I think it's about two thousand years between them.) (And yes, just the first two, largely because I'm really not a fan of next-gen stuff.) This left me very surprised the first time I realized Leareth was Ma'ar! Had not at all realized he was a comically evil villain in canon, a true inspiration to us all.

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Onto the actual reaction!

Right off the bat I gotta say that I'm a huge fan of the split reality type thing happening with the slashes; I'm a real sucker for that sort of thing and I think it's a great bit of intrigue to kick things off with.

Trying reeeal hard to remember who Gala is. She's not Tran's Companion because all the Groveborns are dudes, and she's not sad. - Oh, she's Tylendel's, oh no. Has she ever shown up in glowfic (that I've read)? I feel like she did once or twice. Maybe in Osirion.

From a personal stance it's really funny to read "brown as the mud by the side of a river" coming right off of Stephenie "Cambodian monastery ceiling" Meyer. I do like the specificity, though.

Now I'm remembering the first Swimmerthread I read, which of course the one with Vanyel and Cam in Milliways, and I just thought Yfandes was a basic killjoy nanny character and now I'm like. I woulf daevafy for this horse. Yfandes is really good actually, 10/10 horse of the year at minimum.

The idea of characters who have enough future vision to already know and love someone before having ever met them is fantastic, incidentally. I'm kind of unclear to what extent this is truly happening here versus just being the Lifebond and some less concrete visions, but it's still cool.

~Prediction Lightning Round!~

• "Somewhere, a baby takes her first breath and cries; she does not yet know that she is loved, or what love is." I feel like this isn't Yfandes but I don't have a better guess than Yfandes.
• "Somewhere, a young man in green with flaming red hair holds a silver-haired woman as she weeps." This sounds like Stef and Savil; idk a specific incident.
• "Somewhere a forest burns." This sounds awfully book eleven-y. I tried to avoid B11 spoilers for a long time but I think I did not successfully leave unspoiled that there's something to do with a forest. Or maybe it's the end of this one?
• "Somewhere, lightning flashes over a raging river." I'm gonna say this is either a Van drowning incident or like, the specific and important instance of Van not drowning. On a tower. - Probably there isn't a river in that one?? I don't recall ever hearing of one. My money's actually on something that I don't know about.
• "One shard is constant: mountains, falling snow, a place far from here. A pathway carved by dark magic, that must not be crossed. She stands with him, her Chosen, she will not let him face this alone." I get no points for this one :Þ

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Back to parareactions, one thing that surprised me but should not have is that it got a lot easier to do this when I remembered it was on AO3 and I could just open it there, instead of digging up the copy on my beloved e-reader. Much to consider wrt how to make reading easier for myself.

The MVP for this chapter is: Slashes! As in the punctuation mark.

marikiathoi:

idr who has interesting nickname things going on, but:
"do they have a nickname? who gave it to them? if it's not derived from their real name, what's the story behind it?"

Once again I'm going to interpret this very broadly and just kind of take it as rambling inspiration for whatever catches my eye as I scroll down my character page haha.


Alphabet Soups: I think it's fairly common for some of them to get nicknamed their actual spellings! Earth ones in middle school and Astrocracy ones in particular. Ariel as Rel, Arienne as Ren, Ellie as Le, Ivy as Iv, that kind of thing. I think I initially had this in the backstory of the original one, in Sangrade with Polar, but now that she's been determined to be trans and with a deadname of Casey I think that doesn't really hold water anymore. Maybe they do it as a cute couple-y thing in the modern day (or "modern day", it's still 2014 there).

Ancora - Dumb Baby: I mean obviously there's the fact that I call her dumb baby and I think that's fun. The version who sticks with Cleo gets named Cora, of course, but I fully expect and want her to have different names for every hypothetical version that diverges from the point at the end of now that I know what I'm without. I think if she ever runs into Eugene he'll call her Mildred (you see, because he's an old man and also she's 'a thousand dreads' for sure) but if the two of them ever run into Izzy again for the monstrous domesticity premise of my dreams, she'll make him rename her something else, and it'll probably land on Agnes Mildred Cullen. I don't have any other ones planned.

Ancora - Ancorabenilisifentiliane: Okay don't say any of these out loud to them because you'll cause them physical pain! (Or, as physical as anything gets for them.) But I used to amuse myself by internally calling them "Ben", "Benny", "Lisy" (as in a cutesy version of "Lisa"), or "Tilly". Or "Ancora Hoover Hooper", because of Patti Lupone and the open-skirt coat thing with pants combo.

Delilahs: So on the constellation you might notice that the template is listed as "[de|i|a]scension", and that's because as I mentioned in the last post her main attractor is experiencing a drastic shift in consciousness, so the idea is that it's 'ascension', 'descension', and '"i"scension' (not a real word, but in theory it's meant to convey a lateral move). However the truth of the matter is that I used to listen to the radio host Delilah every single night growing up as I fell asleep, and I just wanted to use the name! Her theme is lyrics from songs of the sort that were played on that show (and I should really update the icons on her human gallery to match that sometime).

Jadey - Hope: I feel so bad (but also kind of amused) that Alicorn gave me so many volleyball-set chances for me to spike and name Hope into the actual text of stare, and I completely ignored all of them because I brain-wrote an exchange that I really need to happen first, where they tearfully proclaim that "She named herself Felicity" as explanation for why Jackie did that. :Þ

Jidas: It's still really really funny to me to call the version of Judy that got turned into a Tanzpire on top of already being a Sangrade vamp "Judy "Judy Jenkins" Jenkins". It's such a dumb joke but it brings me such joy every time. Also the reason Pieters doesn't have any of the appropriate phonemes is because she picks a different name later.

Starchild - Izzy: You know, I think she might actually be the only character of mine to have a nickname as the actual thing on the character account. Like if you look at the Jidae, Jackie is listed as "Jacquelyn" even though no one but Chevrons calls her that, and similarly with Jace and "Jacelyn" and Nudge and "most star clouds don't have names", and all the Soups that go by Ari but're listed as the full versions above. I'm not changing it though! For probably semi-obvious reasons.

Starchild - Cyllene: Cyllene is the name of one of Jupiter's moons (as is Ariel, which is why it was chosen), but if you look up the pronunciation it's supposed to be like 'suhleeni'? Originally I was going to hold with that, and in the toppost of seaweed you can see that her uncle does actually call her "Llene", which I don't think quite makes an entire sense now that it's officially been changed to 'sigh-lean'. Like you can argue that it works but you do have to argue it first, IMO.

Starchild - Simon and Silas: I think both of the valentine-gallery Starchen call each other "Si", and that's very cute to me :].

A friend invited me to go to the city along with him and his girlfriend to go see his friend's jazz band.  He'd never heard them play before so there was some chance it could have been the incomprehensible kind of jazz, but actually it was pretty groovy!  I'm gonna look them up later I think.

Also we went out for Korean beforehand and now I have lots of kimchi pancake leftovers!

#74 with Proto-Nudge and Quinn. I rolled for both characters this time since the first one was so versatile ^^>.

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"Hey," calls the strange fluffy man, striding through the tent as if he belongs there. "Want some advice?"

"Uhhhhhhhh," Quinn intones. If: people don't belong at home, then: they don't get to come in, so: anyone at home belongs there, but: everyone else has always come through the door flap instead of spontaneously appearing in the living room. So: ???. "Yeah?"

"You should get out more." (Quinn gets out plenty, on - ) "Not on errands. Go places, see things, maybe meet someone with punctuation for a name instead of letters."

"Uhhhhhh..."

"'It was just a joke,' he clarifies, dropping the title," he says. "But the advice is sound. ...Except for how it's text."

Quinn isn't used to having this kind of complex conversation aimed at her.

"And that's the problem," he continues. "There's no time, but - try it, will you?" And he disappears.

---

I really like the idea of matching an exact wordcount but since 100 is really very little, and I want to make continuing to do this as easy on my brain as possible, and I'm a twelvesy person anyways - I've decided to do aim for 144 instead, on at least some of these.

I've been working on learning toki pona! But much more than that I've been immediately jumping into trying to translate songs into it without quite having the full knowledge that would support that XD. Here's an attempt at the first verse of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" that I threw together Christmas night.

Doing a ton of rapid chord changes while singing in toki pona was a little beyond my ability, so I've included both full and simplified versions here!

Simplified Version

    D       A
jan nasin o kama
   D       G D A
li pona li kalama
  Bm A       D A  D A  E   A
o kama, o ta - wa e ma Petelen
  D       G D
o lukin e o-na
   Bm   G    A
ni li lawa e sewi
  D
a o lukin e ona!
            A
a o olin e ona!
  G     Em  A   G   D
o lukin li olin e ona
A   D
jan Jesu

Full Version

    D       A
jan nasin o kama
   D A  D  G D A
li pona li kalama
  Bm A  E A  D A  D A  E   A
o kama, o ta - wa e ma Petelen
  D A7  D G D
o lukin e o-na
   A  D    E7 A
ni li lawa e  sewi
  D A D   G D
a o lukin e ona!
    A D   A7 D A
a o o-lin e  o-na!
  G D   G6 E A   D Em D
o lukin li o-lin e on-a
A   D
jan Jesu

A friend told me about the "pre" HTML tag and that made things a lot easier than just trying to change the font! Thanks unbitwise!

Mostly I live on Discord but I've been having some worries about the direction it's been going. Combined with a general desire to get more forum-like places in my life and the advice of some friends, here I am! Looks really promising so far.