The Feast of Childermass

The ladies

study in the red keep.

PS, I showed this to @lucienjynix who reminded me of this atrocity that stayed in my latest fic WiP for longer than I’m proud of.

So at the very beginning of the play there was a scene where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are at a funeral as the primary mourners. A stretcher is carried on with a covered body. The body was notably very small. They laid flowers on it and Macbeth immediately left for battle.

Now *I* studied Shakespeare in college so I immediately knew there is one single line that implies that the Macbeths lost a child at some point. Most of the time this isn't utilized in productions; it's just a throwaway line, intended to paint just how determined Lady M is for this regicide thing to work and how furious she is that her husband has cold feet. In this production she delivers "I have given suck, and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me" nearly in tears. She takes a moment to steel herself before saying, "I would while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains pit, had I so sworn" and she very nearly SCREAMED this in Macbeth's face.

Also noted was how the Macbeths looked at Macduff's children. Lady M was clutching her heart, nearly breaking watching them embrace their parents. Macbeth could not even look at them.

At the end of Lady Macbeth's plot, when she is sleepwalking and sleeptalking, she is typically portrayed as speaking to no one or to her husband. However, at a certain point of her monologue she got on her knees, raised her voice to a comforting octave, and began miming tear wiping, hand holding, hair and face stroking, around a child-sized figure. "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave." Then she stands and appears to take the child's hand. "Go to bed, go to bed. I can hear knocking at the gate-" then she looks down and realizes that no one is there, followed be the most heartbreaking shriek I've ever heard followed by a full minute of her just weeping while curled up on the floor before she stood up, finished her monologue and left the stage.

Most of the time when the loss of a child is utilized in a performance or adaptation, it is assumed that the child was an infant and lost some time ago. To imply that the child died IMMEDIATELY prior to the events of the play and had been cared for and loved by their parents for a few years adds such a fascinating layer to the desperation to ascend to the throne, Lady M's madness, and Macbeth's initial hesitation into "in for a penny, in for a pound" attitude, Macbeth's fury that Banquo's, not his, children will take the throne, and even Macbeth's eventual demise following a frenzied final battle.

How far will grief push you to fill a hole? How far will grief push you to desperation? And what happens when none of your new pursuits are filling the void left by the one you lost? And what happens when you realize you have nothing left to lose?

We filled the party with theories about other cakes we'd loved before. We showed each other fun cake decorating videos on our phones and laughed about 'Is It Cake' gifs.

Roll for Fandom - Prompt-based, no specific fandoms listed because I like having to think about it rather than just being told what to write for.

Roll for Pairing - Sometimes I write smut, sometimes it's just a little slice of life scene, but I'm fundamentally a pairing-based fic writer.

Main Trope - What trope will be the spine of the fic?

Quick Add Something! - My favourite bit is adding in a random prompt to force me out of my comfort zone.

My advice is to roll up the four, spend about five minutes on theorising, throw on a high BPM song and set a 20 minute timer.

And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.

everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.

for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.

this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.

I stg I'm about to knock a bitch's phone out of their hands next time I'm at a show.

The Residence is a fun, silly romp. But it's got all those great Benoit Blanc quirks, and it lets you actually look for clues alongside the detective.