End of the Work Week Pic and Video

Be proud of me! I'm almost done with the first season of Young Royals, and as much as I'd love to share my thoughts here, they'll have to wait. The thriving fandom (especially over at Tumblr) has done a spectacular job picking the show apart, picking the characters apart, picking the soundtrack apart -- everything that could be picked apart has been picked apart. And if I were smart, I'd just share links or embed posts here (which I'll probably do if my energy levels flag and my brain shuts down). 

That said, diving into this series is not only entertaining me in a good way, but also doing a bang-up job of reigniting my love for boarding school romances. It's kind of important for me to keep those fires burning since Compline is set in a boarding school. A creepy boarding school. No royalty in sight, though. Anyway...

Fandom (generally speaking) is fun as long as people don't take stuff too seriously. There are, of course, fandom corners I refuse to touch (i.e., Star Trek and Star Wars) because they're all tainted by too many alpha-wannabes, and life's too short to rub shoulders with people who ruin things for everyone. Tumblr, for all its reputation as a hellsite, is so anarchic on so many levels, and it manages to do so in a pretty fun and colorful way. And if I were to go back to setting up a social media account, that's the only place for me to settle in and feel comfortable about. 

So you can kind of tell that's where I'm getting all of my fun social media posts when it comes to shows and films that float my boat with their queer content -- though admittedly I've yet to check out Red, White, and Royal Blue, which is quite likely a non-starter as I didn't like the novel at all. But at the moment the YR fandom's in full swing, and people have been posting some pretty good analyses of the show overall. As I'm not even done with the first season, I'll hold off delving into more of a good thing over there. 

One of the fun things fandoms do is cobble together their own take on a show's soundtrack. I can't do it, myself, unless I'm very, very familiar with the plot and the characters, but this one struck me out of nowhere while I was scouring Youtube for certain videos (not YR-related). It's not at all the young romance type of thing -- if anything, it's a very adult take on Wille and Simon's relationship, but it works. And I can see this from Wille's POV overall though Simon's POV can also work. The show's focus is primarily on Wille and how he navigates the awful waters of being the crown prince, but it still does a pretty effective job in exploring the idea of "accident of birth" in general (a favorite theme of mine in fiction) which means no one chooses the family and the circumstances they're born into. 

So from Wille's POV based on the meager number of episodes I've managed to watch so far, this song nails it. Oh, even the freaking video works in conveying the escalating crisis in Wille's head, I'll have to add, and it sure helps that I not only love the song, but the video as well. It's really well made and simply mesmerizing.

My favorite verse:

Come to me, just in a dream
Come on and rescue me
Yes, I know I can be wrong
And maybe you're too headstrong
Our love is
Madness

I see that as a message from Wille to Simon, and that's the hill I choose to die on. Cool. Did I do justice to the fandom and the show? Well, that's my contribution to the fun, and I'll likely post more stuff -- my own take on things, anyway, which might not jive with the younger set on Tumblr (because I'm such a fogey). Any connections I'll be making will be very adult in angle for what it's worth. But, hey, I'm enjoying this almost nostalgic dive back into some kind of fandom even if I'm not actively writing fanfic or showing fanart or anything like that. 

Anyway, I'll be back to writing tomorrow and Sunday, and The Dubious Commode will be finished sooner than later as I only have a little over 20,000 words left to go for the first draft to be done. That's not a lot of words, actually, and that number goes incredibly quickly once I cross the final marker (which is the 20K-word mark). The book will be done mid-April, methinks, and then I'll be spending the rest of that month and all of May revising and editing. 

And then...

I'll be back to writing gothic horror, which I'll get started on soon. I'm still on the fence as to when exactly I'll begin work on Voices in the Briars, but it'll come even before -- quite likely well before, in fact -- I'm done with revisions and edits for The Dubious Commode. And so further whet my appetite, I'm scouring the 'net for ridiculously gorgeous dark images like the one above, which was from @ghost.flowers . Hello, weekend, at last!