i wanna mess with it
On tenderness and sincerity and dancing at the club, and, importantly, lesbianism
Hello pals!! It’s been a while!! This summer has been strange for me; I got signed off work at the start of July, so it’s been a weird combination of finding such relief and joy at being able to rest and spend time with my important people, at the same time as adjusting to coming off my medication. I’ve not slept well for about 3 weeks now and it’s starting to make me feel somewhat insane, so if this newsletter has a slightly (more) manic tone (than usual) that will be why.
This newsletter is more of a collage of thoughts on various recent experiences, in contrast to my last few that have been slightly more connected essays. Also featuring some poetry (not by me) and a playlist (by me) as a gift to you for reading!
The Bear
I really loved season three of The Bear!! I can see why some people found it frustrating or unsatisfying, but as a big enjoyer of stories where not much happens I really found it satisfying. I think the frustrating circle Carmy is in this season felt very real, and I found it quite familiar as someone who’s felt a feeling of stuckness for much of this year. The show resists oversimplification, of both plot and character, and so the moments of catharsis and tenderness feel hard-won and satisfying. The episode that followed Tina’s journey to the Beef was so moving - the scene between her and Mikey where they connect despite living quite different lives was so touching without feeling too trite or forced. For me, the show does a really good job of portraying a group of people who care about each other and are trying to show up for each other, at the same time as having to work against their own issues/anxieties/histories to be able to do this. It feels like an antidote to many contemporary stories where in order to show that the characters are flawed they are all just kinda awful to each other all the time. Even at their most harsh and harmful, the characters are mostly motivated by love and care.
On an almost entirely unrelated note, I would highly recommend the music video for One That Got Away by MUNA, in which, among other things, Josette does sexy line cook in a way that Jeremy Allen White could not hope to aspire to. Just, you know, a little treat for you all <3
Romance by Fontaines D.C.
I have been obSESSED with Starburster and Favourite, the first two singles off of the new Fontaines D.C. album.
Starburster is such a stomping down the street song, a song that I really feel in my chest and in my heels. As I remarked to Georgia the other week, I love songs with noises in them, and the gasping noise in that song is particularly delicious. Hannah told me she’d listened to it non-stop on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and then again on the train back, and she was so right for that - a deeply addictive song.
Favourite, by contrast to the punkiness of Starburster, feels so wistful and nostalgic. A perfect mix of gentle and painful, I got into it while on a train across Bristol in the setting sun. It reminds me a lot of Djo’s End of Begginning; it feels like it’s reminiscing on something that was really formative and important and that you can never go back to.
With regards to the rest of the album, it really goes against my general trend with music, in that I’ve not really been focused on the lyrics, instead just letting it all wash over me and feeling the mood of it. The lyrics are so poetic, it feels less like a straightforward narrative, and more an atmosphere that they create.
I think as well, they’re the kind of band that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were super cynical and had a bit of an ironic sense of detachment, but actually both in their music and their interviews, they feel very sincere and earnest. I think that really shines through and makes it very satisfying to listen to.
The Weirdest Fanfic I Have Ever Read (And That’s Saying Something)
(cw for non-detailed discussion of sexual coercion/rape, violence - this is probably overwarning, but just in case!)
Okay so the other weekend I read such a deliciously strange fic, and it’s gonna have to be title-on-request because I don’t want any of my hundreds* of newsletter readers judging me. (*less than 25)
The fic is set in a kind of Iron Age/Norse type of setting, and features Steve as the son of a conquering king, his tribe perpetrating a violent conquest on another tribe. Steve is pushed by his father and the fellow men in his tribe to pick a woman to force to have his child. Robin is pushed towards him one evening, but when they get back to his hut and she reveals that she doesn’t want to sleep with him, he decides he won’t follow his father’s orders, and simply sleeps in the bed beside her.
The next day he goes to Eddie, the witch of the conquered tribe, who, after attempting to kill him, agrees to brew a potion that will make Steve fall in love with a woman in the tribe, so that he can more comfortably have a child with her.
The rest of the fic mostly follows Steve and Eddie as they complete the necessary steps to brew this potion.
The plot and the setting is strange and interesting, but the really compelling aspects of this fic for me were the explorations of gender and sexuality, and, even more so, the explorations of what it means to be a writer; what it means to create, and the nature of fanfiction in particular.
The whole fic is written in third person omnicient PoV, from the perspective of a ‘god’ who knows the thoughts and feelings and interior life of all of the characters, but who also features as a character themself: the ‘god’ that Eddie communicates with through his witchcraft. Throughout the fic, the god seems to turn the characters this way and that, considering how they might fit together, how they might fall in love, how they might form friendships and alliances. But they also invest the characters with their own agency - creating settings and situations and then watching the characters make choices.
He didn’t feel drunk anymore. In fact, his head was clear. I kept the curtain of liquor drawn back in his blood, for I wanted to watch him choose.
It makes me think of a line from the song Horseness Is The Whatness on the new Fontaines album, where he sings:
“Will someone/Find out what the word is/That makes the world go round?
’Cause I thought it was love/But some say that it has to be choice.”
As we move through the fic, it becomes increasingly clear that the narrator/god is also a reflection on authorship, and a really creative and fun way of analysing the experience of writing fic. Later on, once Eddie has realised he is falling in love with Steve, he levels the accusation at the god that they knew this was going to happen, that the process of making this potion together would bring them together romantically.
He stood over the cauldron, leaning both hands on the table, thinking you knew you knew you knew in silent accusation.
(Of course I knew.)
There are many delightful fourth wall breaks and little meta references throughout. I really enjoyed the introductions of each character, where the god/author admits that in this setting the characters would not have names such as Steve, Eddie, Chrissy, Tommy, but that equally, you might as well call them that. It felt like a really fun and loving prod at fanfiction, that can simultaneously lean into intense research and detailed settings, and also drop any inconvenient details for the sake of the story.
The biggest fourth wall break comes near the end of the fic, where Steve drinks the potion that he and Eddie brewed together, and has a kind of psychedelic experience, where suddenly he knows everything the god knows. This blows apart and expands the analysis of the nature of fiction and fanfiction, and provides another layer to the meta story being told. The author demonstrates this moment by including all of the references they used to research the fic, structured like an academic bibliography, and included in the body of the text.
Eddie pulled Steve closer, leaning him back as he convulsed, as his eyes rolled back in his head, as he muttered words under his breath which he had no temporal right to know.
Bell, Jacob. “Magic, Genderfluidity, and Queer Vikings, ca. 750‐1050.” History Compass , vol. 19, no. 5, 2021, pp. 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12657.
Markey, T. L. 1972. Nordic Níðvisur: An Instance of Ritual Inversion? Mediaeval Scandinavia, vol. 5, pp. 7–18.
Moen, Marianne. “Gender and Sexuality in the Viking Age.” Centre for Gender Research, 2019, www.stk.uio.no/english/research/pride/gender-and-sexuality-in-the-viking-age.html.
Sørensen, Preben Meulengracht. The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society. 1983.
And then the god talks to the reader more directly:
There are many of them, in the folding between. You have met them. Perhaps you have crafted them yourself. Steve can see them now. He might not quite know what to make of a demogorgon or a Winnebago, but they are not as unfamiliar to him as they should be, and they are unimportant, in the end: what sticks is the repetition. Rock star, monster, blood-drinker, burnout; teacher, farmer, athlete, craftsman; their jagged edges catch and settle and fit through iterations in the tens of thousands.
Here the author considers the nature of writing and sharing fanfiction, of reading and writing thousands of iterations of the same characters over and over again. This was something I considered a little in my dissertation on fanfiction, thinking about how the repetition of fanfiction allowed for a complex and often contradictory conception of the characters to be built up through each repetition.
I don’t really know how to conclude this, I just felt excited to talk about a fic that felt so new and different and also really captured so many of my feelings about fanfic as a genre. The anachronisms and the playfulness with genre and form really reminded me of the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir, which is honestly one of the highest compliments that I’m capable of. My favourite fourth wall break, that inspired a joyful laugh out of me:
(Steve had seen children in the abyss. Of course he had. You know their faces, too.)
Like, yeah, unfortunately AO3 fic writer, I am all too acquainted with the faces of the stranger things kids.
who the fuck are you i’m a brat when i’m bumping that
The world surely does not need more reviews and op ed pieces on brat as an album, but I do feel that the world is lacking a review of a brat club night at a cheesy bristol club on a boat by a person who gets drunk off 2 (two) margaritas and doesn’t do drugs. And my review is: it slayed.
I mean, obviously brat is an album that was made for the club, and honestly, it didn’t even matter that it was at thekla and not a Boiler Room DJ set. Dancing to Guess with Lauren and Sarah (in their matching dyke tshirts, which garnered a lot of attention from the patrons of thekla) felt like an exorcism of all the horrible little demons that have been inhabiting my body while I withdraw from anti-ds. I could pin-point the moment I gave myself neck ache for the coming week (vroom vroom), and screeching ‘WELCOME TO MY ISLAND, BITCH!’ into each others’ faces felt genuinely triumphant.
Earlier that evening, Sarah shaved my head for me for the first time, and like some kind of reverse Samson, the more hair that hit the floor the more powerful I felt. Bald girl summer is hitting!! And brat night was the perfect time and place to finally do something I’ve been thinking about, honestly, since I was a teenager.
This summer has been evidence that there is indeed slay in the flop era, and the biggest manifestation of that has been feeling joy and confidence in dyke-iness to a level I’ve not experienced before. When Miriam said lesbianism was In for 2024, she was so deeply correct.
Dykery
On that topic, here is a poem and a playlist.
playlist: i wanna mess with it
On the theme of being rooted in your body, and/or being capable of forms of love for women that straight men will never achieve!!
Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body by King Willonius
Picture You by Chappell Roan
Handle Me by Muna
I Would by One Direction
LIKE I WOULD by Zayn
Starburster by Fontaines D.C.
Drain Me! by Towa Bird
Solid by Muna
The Man by Goat Girl
Slither by Djo
Well done if you made it to the end of this! I hope you enjoyed! And if you’re in the market for a strange and delightful steddie fic to read feel free to hmu for a link to the one I discussed lol. Also please share reflections on my playlist if you listen to it! Please tell me a song that makes you feel rooted in your body!
I am about to return to work this week, a step that I am feeling significant anxiety over. But reflecting on the past couple of months has really helped me realise that there has been a lot of joy and playfulness among the struggles. I hope that you all find a moment of playfulness and satisfying embodiment in the coming weeks.
Love from M xxxxxxxx