yeah I'm trying. it's not my best though

podcasts and identity crises | she/her | I'm not putting my name here but call me Essa if you want! | Ao3: eleventhhourthoughts

[anonomouslyabanana]

For @western-fence-lizard ‘s October poetry prompts! Full disclosure, not posting all of them but I am posting this one because, well, I don’t think I could put it anywhere else. Not to overshare, but if the medium is the message, I’m taking meta to fucking ball with some of the references I make in this one. anyways. ramble over. 

Transcript under the cut

A SHORT LIST OF DEDICATIONS FOR AS-YET UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS

1. For every other girl who choked down angry words til they sat like bile in her throat for years at a time.

2. For _ _ _ _ _ and _ _ _ _ _. I’m sorry I didn’t know the ways I couldn’t love you until it was too late. I miss you still. 

3. For ____. You make me fucking sick. You know who the hell you are. (You don’t, because I’m never showing this to you. The only timeline in which I write this book is one where I know you never read it. The point stands) 

4. For Ocean and Bryan and Danez. You may think I’m being overly familiar (I am. sorry) given you have no idea who I am, but I promise I’m only trying to afford you the amount of privacy I can without being disingenuous. How the hell do you do it? Is there anyone who your books don’t let you look in the eye anymore? 

5. For everyone who can never put their poems anywhere that one person could ever see, because that reference is way too obvious (the color pink. elephants. Mamma Mia! These ones are all true, really). And my god, to everyone else reading this, I promise it’s so much worse than a love confession. 

6. So what I’m trying to say here is, your favorite poet was wrong. They were fucking wrong to put it all down on paper where you could see it.  

7. (I’m trying so hard to tell you everything I never say out loud. If I said it out loud I think my eyes would fall out of their sockets. I think I would never be able to talk to at least three of my friends ever again. I think I would literally implode into sunbeams from pure motherfucking ecstasy. It’s not an ideal situation, is what I’m trying to say.)

8. If I say it’s performance art, it’s not cowardice, right? If I say that’s why I talk to you when you can never hear it, if I say it’s part of the message, then it’s okay? 

9. Ouroboros, ouroboros, chicken, egg, cycle and cycle and cycle. That’s why I like writing, okay sweetheart? 

10. For burning fire. Who else?

[anonomouslyabanana]

why do the magician heist movies do this to me. they legitimately make no sense, but here I am neck-deep in a google doc musing 'but what if the characters had depth on purpose"

[anonomouslyabanana]

seriously why the hell does Henley Do That in the first movie. this is not a normal magician thing. making your entire audience believe that you're being eaten alive by piranhas in front of their eyes as part of a magic trick is actually fucking insane. Like it's a joke but yeah it's fucking sadistic. And part of me feels like it's sort of a reaction to being danny's assistant for so long, to being an assistant at all. Everyone's looking at her now, that's for sure, but not because she's gorgeous (though she is) or because of her tiny outfit (though, she's not exactly dressed like a nun). No, they're looking at her because they don't believe she can do it, they can't look away because they believe she's really failing, and anyone who's actually afraid is only afraid because they doubt her. god i love her

[anonomouslyabanana]

why do the magician heist movies do this to me. they legitimately make no sense, but here I am neck-deep in a google doc musing 'but what if the characters had depth on purpose"

[anonomouslyabanana]

underrated part of now you see me is the concept of magicians having groupies. This is a world in which doing card tricks good means that not only are beautiful women are falling over themselves to fuck you but they show up to watch you do magic before fucking you

[anonomouslyabanana]

au where instead of disappearing from Dylan's life, Thaddeus finds him as a kid and explains that he and Lionel were partners and he takes him under his wing. It’s definitely not a normal childhood but he hasn’t been abandoned to the foster system with no safety net – when Tressler’s company refuses his mother’s claim, Thaddeus takes care of them. 

The events of the movie are similar but instead of framing Thaddeus it’s more about them testing the horsemen by pitting them against multiple enemies and making Tressler’s downfall more complete. Just give me Thaddeus teaching Dylan sleight of hand, teaching him how to put up mental guards against manipulation and hypnosis, how to craft long cons so intricate they fool the fucking fbi 

[anonomouslyabanana]

entire now you see me series is absolutely incomprehensible. riddled with plot holes howEVER that is what makes it incredible to hypothesize about. there are entire plots that exist only in my head in order to marginally detangle the complete mindfuck that is every single character

[anonomouslyabanana]

charlie and bosco hyping up june's parkour is the same as eliot and hardison fist bumping about parker's acrobatics

[anonomouslyabanana]

the watsonian reason for making joanne company smoke menthols specifically: she drinks vodka stingers, which are minty, so she'd like menthols too

the doylist reason: I don't want to only refer to them as cigarettes because it sounds too repetitive so I like being able to refer to "menthols" as opposed to a specific brand

[anonomouslyabanana]

snippet because the fucking magician heist movie has taken over my brain. it makes no goddamn SENSE. Like the plot literally doesn't compute. Why in the world would anyone fake imprisonment for 10 years. Why is Morgan Freeman so chill about these children in his house. So anyways I tried to make sense of the nonsense:

Thaddeus finds him when he’s, of all things, printing the files on Veronika at Staples. They have a printer at home but it broke when Bosco moved it right as June was doing a flip in the middle of their living room just because she can. They refuse to buy from any major retailers on principle, but that means they have to wait another week before having a functional printer again and he doesn’t have that kind of time. 

So when the old bearded guy comes up to him and addresses him as Mr. Vanderberg, Charlie’s first instinct is to panic. 

“I’m sorry, sir, you must have me mistaken for someone else, I-” he cuts himself off by attempting to sprint in the opposite direction but the old dude manages to trip him with his goddamn cane and make it look like an accident. 

“Oh, here, let me help you up,” the stranger grins at him, winking like they’re sharing a secret. He grasps Charlie’s arm with surprising strength and flashes what looks like a tattoo of-

“Is that an eye?” 

“Not just an eye, my boy. I think we need to have a little chat.” 

Charlie nods numbly, and less than half an hour later, finds himself sitting on a random park bench in Brooklyn with Thaddeus Bradley, holy shit.

Apparently, for all his failsafes and redundancies, his firewall is no match for the hacking skills of a fucking 80 year old. 

“Are you guys going to stop us?” It’s not his only question for the man, but it’s the only thing he absolutely needs to know. 

“Us guys?” Thaddeus makes a big show of looking behind him for more people.

“The Eye, I mean.” 

“I’m not here as part of The Eye,” for the first time since he tripped Charlie, Thaddeus looks weary. “You could use my help. And I could use yours.” 

The whole awful thing comes spilling out. The Eye, drifting further and further from Robin Hood-esque do gooding and deeper into power hoarding and petty squabbles. Dylan Shrike trying to unravel it and finding himself a prisoner of the very organization he dedicated his life to running for his troubles and leaving his whole team in the dark. Thaddeus watching it unfold too quickly to stop it, then not being able to reach any of the Horsemen because Shrike had hidden them so well that he couldn’t find them until they had already split up. 

“I’m sorry,” Charlie finds himself surprised by how much he means it, an apology not as a reflex but as a genuine shared pain. 

“I appreciate that, but that’s not why I’m here. I have a plan, and I need your help.”

[pussyhoundspock]

I really like the part in Merrily at the end where it's just frank and Charley on the roof talking about something shifting something changing and Charley is visibly like am I about to have a closeted gay rooftop hookup with my army roommate and jgrofff is like no far worse a decades long creative partner turned friendship that will break me worse than any of my multiple divorces

[anonomouslyabanana]

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth you are insane. What possessed you to do these things.

[anonomouslyabanana]

unfortunately watching movies on the airplane is ruining my life (I'm now two google docs deep into fics for random ass media)

[ej-brunson]

So companybrained rn

[ej-brunson]

Any1 else in love with raul esparza or is it just me and. Joanne and also sonny carisi and maybe olivia benson idk

[ej-brunson]

AND PETER.

[ej-brunson]

Still my best post i think

[anonomouslyabanana]

acc to me also susan tho that's in my world where raul esparza bobby is an aromantic dyke

[anonomouslyabanana]

I hate having information. Stop telling me things

[anonomouslyabanana]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

10 days after i went into a daze and started writing abt joanne and bobby i now present an ENTIRELY different fic that came from the question 'what if the 2021 production of company made bobby a woman but wasn't afraid to let her be a little gay?"

if you ever thought bobby from company was an aromantic dyke this is for you 

[anonomouslyabanana]

being 100% selfish and posting this here because this proshot yanked me into writing again and i need ppl to scream with me abt it. bobby company aromantic real

[anonomouslyabanana]

I realize it was insane to embed a two hour long video. link here (or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYi7HFPXYo8)