fascination street

「 SEND A ✯ FOR A ONE-OFF ENCOUNTER WITH DONNIE // ACCEPTING. 」

                                            ✯ ✯ ✯

Mitch kept Donnie on a tight leash for most of his visit to Rainier. He barely had a chance to see the stuff he was interested in. Ol' Shortstop talked a lot about the freaky side of campus, and how crazy all the homework is, and the baseball team, and all about his frat, and how wild the parties are... but it was mostly to talk up how rich and interesting Mitch's life is without him, and how much more experienced and street-smart and wisened he is now. Donnie 'actually wouldn’t want to go to any parties this weekend,' Mitch insisted, because the party everybody went to the night before Donnie arrived was so crazy and incredible that everybody is basically too wiped out to do it again until the weekend after Donnie leaves, so he and Mitch may as well just stay in Mitch's dorm and play some card games and catch up. Everyone was so swamped, there was no chance for Donnie to verify any of Mitch's stories by meeting any of his friends — especially not the girl pictured in his latest social media posts.  

But once Mitch had to go to class, Donnie got to roam wild, and he kept an eye out for Mitch’s new favorite flower.

She wasn’t hard to miss. Pumpkin-red hair and hay-thin legs. At least three layers of wool, scarves and linen, which had to be hiding some incomprehensible muscle if all that material didn’t weigh her petite frame down. A classic in Mitch's gallery of crushes: the dainty, doting mouse who would make him feel like a big, strong, firey man in comparison. Mitch never says anything explicit about her, just posts pictures of her and hopes people will use their imagination and assume they're sleeping together, probably. Of course, Donnie doesn't buy it, based on the pastel hazmat suit of knitted fortitude she's wearing. Mitch has to be playing the long game to peel back the wallflower's petals, one layer of clothes at a time.

Anne of Dweeb Gables is sitting adorably with a book on a campus bench — a bit of an insecure display, he reckons, (neglecting any self-reflection on his inability to fathom someone reading in earnest). Donnie just wants to assure her that if she's that desperate for attention, she can leave it to a real southern gentleman to oblige.

                                                   ❛❛  Whatcha readin’?❜❜

The words don’t have a second to register before Donnie’s plucked the novel right out of Violet’s hands, and he’s hopped on the back of the bench, balanced nimble as an alley cat trotting along the top of a fence. Already a foot taller than her when he’s at ground level, he’s way too high up for her to reach. She has a chance at getting her book back if she just knocks him over, but he’s willing to risk it. Donnie knows the type of girl Mitch is drawn to. It wasn’t a girl with any bite.

He purses his lips and takes a brief glance at the back cover summary, and combines it with his look at the cover art to piece together a vague idea of the plot. Half of his mouth curls into a smirk. Suspicions confirmed: she’s a romantic — and a romantic with cheap taste, at that. Within seconds, he’s flipping through the book, with no visible regard for Violet’s page number.

He stops on a random page, skims the dialogue, and gasps. As if he can’t believe Lilianette would choose Diamond over Tonner. Flips to a few dozen pages later, repeats. Exaggerated expressions abound, he finally lands at the last page of the book and reads the final paragraph.

❛❛ Goddamn, Pumpkin. You got a world of crazy coming your way. ❜❜

He drops the book back into Violet's hands, hops down from the bench, and leaves her with that — and with a seeded realization that he didn’t just discard her place. He ambushed her too fast for her to notice that, before he started flipping through, he slid one finger between the paper and folded the corner of her page. The dreaded dog-ear — the bane of many a librarian’s career — she’d never be able to iron out the scar this would leave on her page. But would her first concern be about how the snobs would react, or that he was considerate enough to make sure she wasn’t too inconvenienced by his teasing? Without a bookmark on hand, it was a slick way to spare her the backtracking; the book would open right up to her spot as soon as she spread the covers. The sentiment was meant to soften her reaction to the unprompted harassment, and to hell with the property damage. 

This, here, was the first scar Donnie would leave Violet.

It’s a cold and nasty night. 

And the weather’s nothing to write home about, either.

There’s nothing homey about Jane’s house anymore. The transitions between frigid silence and uproarious outbursts don’t flow in any rhythm. It’s an emotional minefield. There’s no telling when you can let your guard down, or when your calm will be jerked away from you by the sound of someone breaking glass. 

She’s tried to stay stable and temperate, to be a buoy of serene normalcy for her kin to find comfort in while their world is uprooted — but maybe that kind of denial only further frustrates. 

She’s tried to talk to her shy baby brother, shut away in his room like a self-fashioned hunchback in a French cathedral, with the blinds closed all hours of every day and every week — but he won’t come outside when she asks, and he certainly won’t let her in; he waits until she’s outside to situate his headset back over his ear, calls her clinical-sounding slang words she’s never heard before, mutters something about how he doesn’t talk to gashes anymore.

She’s tried to reach out to her twin brother, to ask him to talk to Jeremy, or at the very least, talk to her — but he’s nowhere to be found anymore. Out before people wake up, and in long after everyone’s locked away in their bedrooms for the night. She doesn’t want to be the one to tear the smile from his face in the fleeting moments that she sees him, and it’s not as if he would let her. Joshua swears it’ll all blow over soon enough. Invites her to come by some mindless party later that night. 

She’s tried to talk to her father, but she doesn’t know how to approach him. He’s experiencing every stage of grief all at once. He bargains with her when she tries to speak frankly with him. Oh, don’t be so dour, princess. Let’s have a drink and talk in the morning. Waltz with me, like old times. She struggles to find a way to tell him that she doesn’t trust his coordination enough to dance with him, and doesn’t want a drink, because she doesn’t want to wind up sprawled out and drooling over the embroidered couch pillows like him. They had a finite number of luxury items now. They can’t afford another family member letting the trash pile up, walking past the important envelopes sitting in the mailbox, and the leaving the blinds shuttered. She needs to do something to fix this. But it’s dangerously tempting to give up and rot like the rest of the house. 

She’s tried. She’s tried. She’s tried. She’s tired. Of exhaustively compassionate smiles. Of numbness in place of pain. Of being a ballerina stuck in a little glass box, dancing pretty for anyone who comes by to see her. She is tired of denial, and she is tired of grief.

GRIEF is layers of dead, dried skin weighing down her body, dangling off of her in ribbons and getting caught on chairs and handles every time she tries to move past it all, mummifying her to preserve this feeling forever. She’ll jump in boiling water to wash it away. She’ll let any madman with a chainsaw shred it off of her. She can’t stay in her tomb of a house and watch the grief engulf her in a sarcophagus of numbness and denial like the rest of her family. She’s dying for catharsis. She wants to have fresh flesh, raw and bleeding.

When she ventures out this dark, foggy night, she does not accept Josh’s ride, and she does not take the Lyft to the party, like she told him she would. She takes her first trip on the local bus, wherever it may carry her. 

There’s a smell of something – or someone – foul, incubating in the cramped shuttle, dizzying anyone upon contact as they step inside. Jane doesn’t give herself the time to second guess this adventure, and hurries in with her fare, quickly scanning around for a seat to lock herself into. She tries to focus on the smell of her lavender perfume for comfort, but it’s completely drowned out, and suddenly she knows how her disillusioned family feels when she tries to soothe them. The putrefaction reeks too badly to ignore.

Jane takes in the faces of the world outside of her fairy tale castle: skeletal men with dart holes up their arms, a father and his young son falling asleep on each other, young women wearing modern-day peasant rags in the form of retail uniforms, carrying stained paper bags of poisonously greasy food. She's sickened by herself as she gawks like a top-hatted aristocrat at a carnival freakshow. But her efforts to respectfully avert her gaze fail when her eyes land on a pair of women in studded corsets and dirty leather jackets, with hair and makeup emulating the look of haggard witches who just crawled out of the swamp their village drowned them in.

Maybe her brain is trying to disconnect from the culture shock, or maybe it’s just the stench making her feel lightheaded, but she’s mesmerized at the sight of the girls, beyond any hope of looking away. Her mind’s lost in nightmarishly psychedelic patches stitched to old jackets, intricate loops of braids that get lost in long, knotted hair.

Jane hesitates for a moment when they get off, and then follows, to see what kind of strange ball warranted such a dress code. She trails from a block behind, light on her feet in her lacey kitten heels.

She feels like Clara Silberhaus, sneaking around while her family sleeps, following rats into holes in her walls she never realized were there. The haggard women lead her into a dream world, down a road that would feel empty and abandoned if she didn’t hear the muffled but blaring pandemonium music coming from the building at the end of the street. The pounding of the bass drum that they can hear and feel from the other end of the block must be booming enough to conceal the sound and feeling of Jane walking behind them. They follow haunting, industrial music to a narrow flight of cement stairs, leading into the shadows of a basement entrance hidden mostly by mud and overgrown trees. The doors open for a brief moment and a hellish red light pours out, like the witches have just walked into a medieval furnace. The unmuffled volume music spilling out of the basement startles Jane, but it does nothing to quell her interest. She soldier onward toward the strange dreamland.

Reality comes to her in the very unreal form of a man. Six and a half feet tall, breathing smoke, dressed like a leather pin cushion. He had hair as long as hers, and its ratty texture made it look like thick black veins spilling out of his skull. Face paint and spikes on his body were reminiscent of a devil in an old, eerie, silent European horror film. She hadn’t seen him around the corner of the narrow pathway, but she has to pry her eyes away as she walks past him. Even standing still and staring down at a pen and paper, he’s a domineering presence, like a giant beastly dog guarding the gates of hell. But she’s come too far to let herself be put off by him.

Jane calmly brushes along, trying to look natural as she descends the steps. She almost feels like she’s walked the walk when she makes it past him without so much as a growl. 

She’s punished promptly for her hubris.

The Keeper of the Gates hunches over her from behind, and while the metallic ruckus from the club may have drowned out the sound of his footsteps, she can’t ignore the black shadow engulfing her as his form blocks out the light from the streetlamp at the top of the stairs. As she tries to march out of his silhouette, cold talons seize her, wrapping a firm grip around her hair and wrenching her backwards. She stumbles with her hands grasping to the back of her head after he’d already let go. Pointe-practiced toes catch their balance as she twists around to face him. His figure was even more imposing up close.

              ❝ Go home, Sharon Tate. People like you don’t fare well in crowds like this. ❞ 

She’s stunned silent for a moment, and spends the time remembering the lilac dress she’s wearing— much more suited for the fratty young entrepreneurs party she’d originally dressed for than a night spent dissociating on a midnight bus and wandering into a black metal bar. The absurdity of it makes her want to double down on her impulsive choice. She prefers it to admitting her naivety. She wants to prove him wrong. He has no idea what she can handle. She doesn’t even know what she can handle.

                       ❝ I can survive schoolboys tugging on my pigtails. ❞

This isn’t a playground, though, and she knows that. She hasn’t set foot through the door, and she’s already being streamrolled by one of these schoolboys. She doesn’t know where she’s getting this courage to stand her ground, as if she’s still following dream logic and acting confidently enough will help her gain control of the world. Maybe the imbalance of power and stature transcends what she can comprehend, and it pushes her out of rationality. She twists the adrenaline rush to psych herself up. If she wants to make it out of this encounter, she reasons, she cannot let him smell fear on her. He’s a child in a Halloween costume, she tells herself. He’s trying to fit in with his own kind of country club. He is the fool here. She will not cower. 

                                    ❝ But if it was too hardcore for you,                                           I can try to find you directions to one of                                        those 𝒚𝒖𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒆 𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒔 𝒃𝒂𝒓𝒔 in Belltown. ❞

╳ — manhandling symbol starters! // ACCEPTING FOREVER.

psycho thriller St/and By Me / S/uper Dark Times / Me/an Creek / Secret Histo/ry type of plot where a group of friends accidentally(?) kill one of their peers (preferably on halloween) and panic and hide the body and the bulk of the story is the fallout from that and everybody being driven insane by guilt and memories and paranoia and maybe one of them has a latent bloodlust unlocked by the incident or something idk we can go grounded or get weird (but i think the sweet spot is always when theres one character who goes rly dark and the others are there to ground the story and if its done right their reactions to the one character going super dark is interesting and exciting in itself)

dare i say.... set in new england??? big fall vibes????????????

honestly, since reading your most recent posts about her i’m starting to think i had robin’s perception of her all wrong. he might think she’s very plastic at first, but then slowly start to warm up to her when he realizes how genuine and open she is. he’ll go from seeing her weird wardrobe flourishes as annoying, twee, or tryhard, to seeing them as fun little ways to break up the trend of rainier folks trying too hard to look poetic, sophisticated, effortless or collegiate. 

Anyway most of these are just vague vignettes or hyper specific details rather than big relationship headcanons but i think they illustrate the vibe of their relationship better than a comprehensive analysis would.

i.

Robin and Lane being as broke as they are, he refers to Zelda and Nikki as “our sugar daddies.”

ii.

“Oi look at me sheilas I’m Zelda Fawley and it takes me four syllables to say the word ‘no.’” Cue Robin’s really over-the-top impression of an Australian: “NYAAAOOOUUUWRRE.”

Also: Robin and Nate or Lane going back and forth doing their impressions of an Aussie accent, and eventually he just purposely starts to transition into every other non-American English accent, like he just says “I lost me fookin’ boomerang, bruv” in full cockney, gradually shifting to Scottish and quoting The Proclaimers but acting like this all sounds Australian to him, until she eventually throws a sequined pillow at him like “I KNOW YOU KNOW THAT’S IRISH!!!”

iii.

In the great debate of which cute ginger is Lane gonna date this year, Robin will always root for Zelda over Joy or Violet and he’s extremely vocal about that (though Robin himself will always be the cutest ginger soulmate for his boy, he insists).

iv.

Robin hanging out in her room while she’s doing her makeup for a party, looking at all of the clothes she left on the bed that didn’t make the cut while she was finding the perfect outfit for the night. Gradually just starts trying some of it on and voguing in the mirror behind her to make her laugh and mess up her makeup and have to wipe it off and start over. This goes on for way too long, they get to the party way later than they were supposed to, and he’s wearing a pair of her tacky sunglasses or a beret on his head and her butterfly halter top underneath his unzipped hoodie. “Wow, what if Lane gets so drunk he thinks I’m you and tries to make out with me? Do you think you’d be able to pry him off of me? I don’t know, Zez, I look pretty good.”

v.

Zelda being the unofficial third roommate and having a special mug in Lane and Robin’s place that they don’t let anybody else use, even when she and Lane are on a break --- especially when they’re on a break, in Robin’s case. Every female guest wants to, because it’s the prettiest one, and the only one that doesn’t have some testament to Robin’s sense of humor on it. They always say it has a hole in it and all the coffee spills out, and then proceed to give the lady a mug that just says “anal” on it.

                              “ Ignore the mess. My roommate's a                                         D  I  N  G  B  A  T    who   can't                                         remember what century she's in. ”

All things considered, the dorm is remarkably tidy for a couple of mentally ill college girls. Seems like Sherry strikes enough fear into Joy to make her stay on top of that, lest she get herself placed any higher on Sherina’s Shitlist. When Sherry says “mess,” she means the dizzying hippie decor — the lava lamps, the colorful ornamental tassels, the psychedelic flowers, the record player and vintage band posters. 

She plops down on the bed and uses her cane to gather a rainbow crochet rug on the floor and flick it to the far end of the room, nearly knocking a floral-ornamented acoustic guitar to the ground. The rug was nearly five inches past the imaginary line that separated Sherry's side of the room from Joy's. She gestures the cane toward his assigned seat at her desk.

                “ Just focus on the window and the table, if you get nauseous.            You're not getting out of this group project by slipping into an epileptic fit. ”

「 WHO WOULD MY MUSE RATHER KISS? // ACCEPTING. 」

                                                   ⛧ ⛧ ⛧

God, it’s like talking to one of his uncles at Christmas. How’s the music going, Scout? Can I see that sketchbook of yours? You thinking about going to college? You ever look into that artsy fartsy school in Seattle I told you about? You still talk to Sheinkopf’s kid? Any girlfriends yet? Can you sit down for a second, Jakester? I just want you to know... if you’re gay — listen, that would be totally alright with me. I’m serious! I’m hip.

The difference is that his family had the upper middle class social conscientiousness to quit after the customary twenty questions. Sometimes his grandpa would even bail him out early — beckon him over to the rocking chair under the stockings-adorned fireplace to show him the family’s sentimental vintage leather strap of jingle bells on the mantel, and tell him how he always knew the boy was born a musician, ever since the first Christmas he jingled them with a twinkle of wonder and inspiration in his eyes, and how he’d shake them over and over like he was discovering a new detail in the sound every time. He’d have Jake shake them again ‘for old time’s sake,’ and that would fulfill his requisite family bonding stipulations for the evening. Shake the bells, and the interrogations stop. 

He didn’t mind polite small talk and half-answers and generally putting off his family’s questions until next Thanksgiving. They were good people. They cared about him, and he figured he loved them back to the full extent he could. They just would never understand him — his Condition. 

But Frey listened to black metal. He was Zombie’s trusted bandmate. He was supposed to get it, and yet it seemed like he only took this Condition seriously when they were with Roscoe. He talked to him like they were in the locker room after a big football game, and not in the abandoned mill before a big Sacrament. He didn’t even know how to answer something like that. His cheeks were getting flushed just processing how dumb the question was.

Lizzie seemed nice, he thought. If he really had to think about it. He’s overheard her asking a lot of cool questions about the same sorts of things he’s always talking about, but Zombie never stuck around long enough to talk to her. She wore a lot of clothes, which was pretty unique for those Rainier girls. Lots of beanies. Sweaters. Flannels. Tee shirts that weren’t even cut up to show cleavage or ribs. He’s always had this suspicion that she would be warm if you hugged her — it’s a little weird how often he has that thought — not hot and sweaty, like how a post-workout Frey feels when he puts Zombie in a headlock and gives him a noogie. Lizzie would feel cozy, like a cup of warm tea — and that grossed him out much more than Frey’s sticky armpit hair. God forbid she ever brushed fingers with him in passing. He’d have to hold his hands in an icy lake to feel like himself again.

He suppresses a shudder and shrugs instead, then breaks eye contact to drag his backpack closer to him and starts fiddling with the front pocket.

     “ Iuno. I don’t do that Gone With the Wind-y stuff. Annona I guess. ”

His relationship with Annona was always meant to stay between himself and his computer screen, behind his locked door and under his covers, when his roommate wasn’t home. He didn’t like the fact that he saw her in real life now, much less the fact that he had to awkwardly greet her every time Roscoe brought her around. Still, it was probably safer to pick the spooky doll over the fuzzy teddy bear. It’s not like he’d ever be in a situation where he’d have the opportunity to kiss the Annona Bright, but Frey could — and would — lock him in a room with Lizzie.

      “ Now let me show you this new noise I figured out. ”

Zombie procures a Ziploc sandwich bag filled with shards of broken glass in all different shapes and sizes, and a single blue marble. He slowly rolls the baggie back and forth between his hands. It sounds like the dry death rattle of some old wind chimes, except more violent. 

He gives it a couple good shakes like it’s a leather strap of jingle bells. 

So, this was him. This was the elusive Zombie. This was the man whose voice channeled the reaper himself, and whose lyrics relayed the final thoughts of the damned as they passed into oblivion. This was the wicked, anguished soul who lit a fire under Seattle for the first time since 1988. This was the fearsome, demented headbanger laid bare, after he went backstage and washed the lambs’ blood off of his face. Frey never expected him to be so…

                 …adorable?

But here he was, like a dumb, weird little baby bird for Frey and Roscoe to look after. In the past few months, this blasphemous beanpole was fast becoming Frey’s best buddy. He was just as eccentric as you would predict, but surprisingly sincere, and much funnier than anyone could imagine.

At least, he hoped the kid was just kidding around when he said things like this. His wide green eyes were hard to read, but most folks in their milieu had an unconventional sense of humor. He figured that Zombie’s earnest tone was part of whatever bit he was going for.

Some part of him believed that, if he could just act like this was all a joke, Zombie would start to see it as one too. Every part of him prayed for that.

   “ that’d  be  sicker  than  HELL,  man ! ”

Frey snorted as he perched on a gravestone, slumped forward as if avoiding some imaginary EJECT button he wouldn’t want to lean against, and pulled a flask of cheap rum out of his jacket. A long swig for himself, and he offered it over. 

  “ but  why  stop  at  a  button  when  you  could  make ‘em  motion-sensored?       y’know,  like  those  goofy  HALLOWEEN CANDY BOWLS  with  the       skeleton hand  that  grabs  your  wrist  when  ya  get  near  it. ”

He contorted his face and grasped his hands out at the kid, imitating a corpse bursting out of its grave with a vengeance, complete with a guttural screech — “GLLARGH!” — as he jerked forward. Then he laid back into his slouch with a calm smile.

   “ we’ll  get  one  of  them  rainier eggheads  to  rig  it  up. ”

Jake’s eyes twinkled when Frey lunged at him. This guy was the real deal.

He accepted the flask, but forgot he had it in hand before he even took a sip. Jake wasn’t much of a casual drinker, unless he was doing it to excess to see what happens when he gets alcohol poisoning. But it seemed polite to take it, and Frey showed him he was the real deal with that carcass candy bowl idea, so Zombie had to show him he was the real deal by swallowing a gulp as big as Frey’s. His roots in all that salty Florida death metal really showed in the arsenal of flasks he kept on him all the time. It was crazy how this guy could just walk around drinking the stuff all day like a real pirate. He had to be pretty passionate about it, too, if he kept buying it in place of paying his rent.

         “ we should set up a gig where you have to walk                         through the  𝖇𝖔𝖔𝖇𝖞 - 𝖙𝖗𝖆𝖕𝖕𝖊𝖉 𝖇𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖞𝖆𝖗𝖉  to find us.                                                          that’s a good way to weed out the weak. ”

His gangly legs criss-cross-apple-sauced as he sat down against the headstone facing Frey, and his bony knees bobbed up and down, giddy and inspired.

                       “  if you can’t handle getting hugged by some dead bodies                     flying through the air, you’re not BRUTAL enough           to  survive  a   M o o n c a l f   show.  ”

He stopped absent-mindedly twisting and untwisting the cap and pressing his calloused fingers as hard as he could to see if he could leave an indent in them, remembering that he was being rude, just hoarding it. He tilted his head back and poured out as much as he thought he could swallow, but he was still nursing half of it between his cheeks after his first effort. He leaned forward to complete his Rainier Handshake with Frey, and hoped that staring down at the ground would help hide his grimacing face while he choked down the rest. He rushed to regained his composure to keep talking before Frey had the chance to tease him over his performance.

in all seriousness i’m trying to take politics out of my writing and just write my muses in a kind of timeless space especially bc i feel like i’m still learning and growing everyday and i always find my takes from a year ago to be rly embarrassingly naive but. i do think that writing abt the politics of ppl who aren’t politically engaged is really funny so i needed to get this out of my system even though i never really want to make any of these ideologies central to a muse’s plots/personalities and i’m gonna avoid actually mentioning any of this in threads.

♡ — Sabrina Mazel.

ambiguously liberal. basically fine with rainbow capitalism even if she sympathizes with the arguments against it. unengaged in politics until she’s dating someone who is engaged. will show up to protests with all of the enthusiasm in the world but will instinctively make room for cops to pass as they’re walking through the line and say ‘thank you” when they take down barricades to let a march cross a street. thinks soldiers are romantic. one of my only characters who i believe actually votes and it’s always straight ticket democrat. 30+ year old sabrina probably goes to local civic meetings and claps for everybody who speaks; gets really involved with charity drives at her local library, has a stupid amount of faith in her community and doesn’t lock her front door at night even though someone has probably robbed her before. 

✯ — Donnie Marshall.

oldschool alex jones style libertarian, but most of his politics are just surface level. don’t-tread-on-me second amendment absolutist. convinced that if a cop shows up at your house without a warrant you’re legally allowed to shoot them in the face. bullies vegans. his major qualm with the confederate flag his dad hung in the window of their house is the fact that his dad likes it. automatically hates every politician even if their beliefs are identical to his. may not believe hillary clinton literally eats babies but he’s not ruling it out. overall doesn’t actually care about anything and most definitely doesn’t vote. not connected enough to know what a “snowflake” or a ““primary”” is. has a conversation about politics maybe once every other year. still appropriates boot camp chic but always refused to wear dog tags because he didn’t like the implication of the name. has no idea what wars we’re in right now despite almost being shipped off to fight.

⛧ — Jake “Zombie” Halvorsen.

true neutral. completely apolitical. does not understand. very ironic considering his association with both frey and roscoe but it also makes him easier for them to influence. grew up in an ambiguously patriotic republican but ultimately disengaged household. fully believes frey and roscoe when they tell him he should be pissed but doesn’t really know what he’s pissed about. zones out the instant anybody mentions the president’s name. mostly riled up about climate change but doesn’t know any details. surprisingly the most intuitively understanding and nonchalantly supportive lgbt ally out of all of my muses, including the politically engaged ones and the actual lgbt ones.

⊗ — Stella Miska.

chaotic. shit-stirrer. publically identifies as a single-issue voter for the legalization of drunk driving, but when you talk to her one-on-one, her politics will be whatever are the opposite of yours. assumes all rich people are pedophiles until proven otherwise. supports every conspiracy theory on principle. has never voted in her life but will tell you that she wrote in her ecstasy dealer. anti-brunch populist. pro-catcalling. tries on ideologies like halloween costumes and gets so into character on stage that people think she’s serious and start booing her. has a complicated relationship with religion, impossible to tell if she’s actually catholic or just really sarcastically wearing that crucifix around her neck. politely requesting mods unban her because she only violated community guidelines ironically.

⚜ — Dia Winokur.

honestly just a practical little socdem, but can empathize and argue in favor of most leftist perspectives. avoids vocalizing any politics because she doesn’t want to alienate anyone, but is more comfortable showing how much she actually knows once she realizes someone aligns with her. has always been pro-union and invested in labor rights because of her mechanic mom, Rita, and got invested in foreign policy and abstruse theory in a desperate effort to hold conversation with Anya. Has spent enough time around the Jean-Luc Godard characters that populate the art scene while working at Anya’s gallery to know which theorists are hip to talk about and can BS her way through conversations about Marxists she’s never read before, but believes that less is more when it comes to talking about politics.

⛯ — Max Bronte.

politics seemingly begin and end with gay rights, in honor of her gay cousin, but people who are close to her know that she’s righteously but self-consciously concerned with animal rights, in honor of her endangered favorite sea turtle. vegetarian, selectively vegan. tries so hard to clarify that she's not one of those annoying PETA vegetarians who judges everybody who isn’t like her that she kind of ends up being equally annoying. comes from a right-leaning household so the fact that she picked up on cultural liberalism in high school felt like a big accomplishment. intermittent feminist who gets defensive when someone complains about straight white boys and can’t get behind being proud of herself for sleeping around as much as she does. doesn’t really know that much about what nikki’s talking about half the time; will try to pay attention (and usually fail bc she has a million other things on her mind), but hell yeah sure tampons should be free absolutely. found out about human rights violations in prisons and about the bureaucratic hell of trying to file for insurance and government assistance while trying to help Sid and has become a lot more radicalized than she realizes.

MUSE MUSIC PROFILES vol. i: Donnie Marshall.

trying to describe donnie’s music taste, the best jumping off point is PUNK, specifically the early NYC and overall American scene rather than the British scene, which he finds snottier. (he’ll listen to them but he hates europe too much to openly advertise that he likes The Adverts or Mungo Jerry or The Damned or Eddie & the Hot Rods).he doesn’t actually care about the revolutionary undertones - he’s extremely disengaged from politics, he likes it more for a broader sensibility of defiance (and of just having a good time). if we were going to zone in on a specific sound, he's mostly into proto-punk and first wave punk, in that era where there was still a lot of sexuality ingrained in the music, especially coming out of the garage rock years. The Stooges. Richard Hell and the Voidoids / Television. Bad Brains. The Dictators. The New York Dolls.  The Velvet Underground. Death (the detroit rock band, not the metal band (my other owen teague fc would listen to the metal band though)). Suicide. The Sonics for garage bangers. Likes both The Outcasts band from texas and The Outcasts from ireland but you can guess which one he prefers. 

Liberally jumps across genre lines as long as the energy is right. Some folk, some skiffle, some twang, some jug and bluegrass, as long as the lyrics have a sense of humor, or feel mischievous or lewd, or he can dance to it. I do kinda love the mental image of him listening to really wholesome 70s bubblegum bops by like Bay City Rollers while committing atrocities or vandalizing an ex’s house in the middle of the night, though. so I’m gonna say he listens to some of that too. I like when Mitch and Donnie have that 60s greaser/rockabilly energy so it’s funny to associate them with music that reflects that era. think The Human Beinz. I feel like he would be able to keep up with most conversations about 60′s/70′s music with Joy and Lane but I think Pink Floyd-y experimental/artsy/progressive rock bands would be too gloomy for him. He’s a laid-back dude but he likes his music to be high-energy.

his #1 favorite/character-defining band is THE RAMONES, and because he doesn’t have a very big wardrobe, you’ll see him rocking the same $5 Walmart shirt with their logo (faded from years of wear & tear) every couple of weeks. i know i have multiple muses from nyc, including one who literally grew up in queens, but im giving my ramones fandom to donnie because they suit his personality more than any other character i write. they’ll write songs with bizarre or EᗪGY subject matter like nazis / the KKK,  dee dee ramone’s boyhood prostitution, shock therapy / lobotomies / asylums, somehow multiple songs about sniffing glue, whatever horror movie they last watched, and blowing up your high school, but then on the same album they’ll have these very sincere and innocent love songs, and that’s basically the best representation you can find of donnie’s personality. the music is fast, straightforward, bouncy, and short enough to keep his attention from start to finish. the imagery is very all-american, the bandmates were deeply mentally ill and their emotions were completely unhinged but they had a spirit to them that made them impossible to dislike. and they capture a boyish energy and innocence underneath a lot of shock value mischief. i don’t want to call donnie “harmless” in the way i would call the ramones’ drama & antics harmless, because he definitely is NOT. but I do want to have that underlying thread of innocence to him that makes you feel like he wouldn’t be the way he is if it weren’t for the environment he grew up in. (i also think that playful aura makes him more dangerous because it makes people more likely to let their guard down and/or give him a second chance, like oh yeah you’re pretty sure he killed your hamster but when he gives you that goofy, mischievous smile and asks you to dance with him, are you really gonna say no to that face?) ... also the ramones really loved baseball, so donnie would dig that.

when i’m actually writing donnie, my ooc playlist has a lot of The Cramps, Dead Kennedys, Misfits, The Radiacs, Violent Femmes, Black Flag, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, etc. I think modern!Donnie would listen to a lot of those bands too, because he just likes any alt/counter-cultural music, but I think those bands in particular would be his go-tos in his late-80′s-early-90s au verse, along with more metal (particularly black metal or energetic death metal) to go along with the satanic panic elements at play in that au.