Aurilly

First: for my belly kink exchange that I ran in August, I ended up writing:
scenes in a stilltent, Dune (movies), Paul/Duncan, 1200 words, mpreg. This did not have nearly as much belly kink as I intended, but Duncan turned out to have so many feelings about the whole thing that it was a struggle to get to the kink. The recip seemed to really like it though. <3

And then, today I finished posting that WIP I've been nattering about for ages! \o/

postcards from, Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel, 15k!!! of vignettes from first contact to the first gig of tour. Title is a riff on the video summaries like this one they've been doing at the end of their run at each venue. (They're less annoying on Instagram. IDK why they feel the need to do that stacked vertical thing everywhere else. ;__;)

I've never written anything quite like this before. There is obviously a general emotional arc from "not spoken in 12 years" to "going on stage together," but most of the scenes are intended to stand alone. There are very few callbacks between scenes. I also specifically set out to write only the vignettes I wanted to write, partly to avoid just getting totally overwhelmed, but for example that means that at no point during this fic do we seem them really hash stuff out or have big conversations. Presumably they had some, but those happen off screen.

I also mostly avoided writing denouments to scenes; they mostly end in the middle, or unresolved. Partly I was trying to write the opposite of one big scene where the characters work all their shit out in one long conversation, which I am sometimes prone to. And I think writers in general or prone to? It's convenient to take care of the whole conflict at once. Whereas here I kind of wanted to give these snapshots along the way, showing that repairing a relationship is a long process over time, often in the small moments. (But also I was lazy/intimidated about writing all the connective tissue, and if I'd tried that I wouldn't have been able to finish a fic, so.)

I also wrote this so fast, at least for me. I wrote the first 10k in three weeks, mostly in August, and then wrote the remaining 5k in the four weeks since.

Also, I decided to post a vignette a day, which was fun. I've never been able to do that with a fic before, but a lot of the vignettes were very short, some in the 200-word range, so one a day felt right. I accidentally timed it so the final chapter went live this morning, a few hours before Oasis performed their first gig in a couple of weeks. A commenter congratulated me on my deliberate timing, but no, that is definitely just how things fell out. (Nerdily, my priority was to get the fic all published within one calendar month for the sake of my stats keeping.) Also, look at me, posting fic outside an exchange!!

I'm still not sure what I actually think about it as a fic, because it's so different from my norm, but I had fun writing and posting it, and that's the whole point, right? There are a lot of lines I'm really happy with. Also it's my second fic this year over 15k, which feels fantastic after last year.

The Conjuring 4: Last Rites (2025). Man, this was terrible. Way too long, took forever to get the Warrens to the actual case, the case family got dropped for the entire middle of the movie, unbearably saccharine epilogue. The whole plot turns on the Warrens' daughter Judy having almost died as a baby, being gifted with Lorraine's clairvoyance, and being chased down by the demon(s?) who had her marked for death. However, somehow the characters don't figure that last part out until the climax even though it's blatantly obvious ten minutes in, so the emotional arc of Lorraine mentoring Judy into embracing her gift rather than telling her to hide from it is crammed into like a minute and a half.

Oh and Ed has heart trouble again, which means nothing. He's fine at the end. The bit in the middle where the doctor tells him he can't afford another heart attack is just a red herring.

People said this was something of a return to form after The Conjuring 3, but despite that one's glaring holes, at least it wasn't the draggy self-indulgent mess this one was.

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Him (2025). A promising college quarterback is invited to train with the greatest professional quarterback of all time (Marlon Wayans) and gets more than he bargained for. This is football as a cult/football as folk horror. It is not, despite the impression I got from the trailer, about a kid making a deal with the devil at the beginning and then having it unravel on him; it took me a solid hour to accept that it had no intention of being that specific movie.

This movie has a lot of really nice shots, and both Wayans and the lead Tyriq Weathers are both great. I'm always here for folk horror and weird ritual shit, which this has elements of. I enjoyed the surreality as Cade questions how much of what he sees is even actually happening. The ending is very fun and my favorite part of the movie, even if the movie gets a bit too much into explaining itself.

That said, I wasn't sure what all the movie was trying to do. Thematically, I don't feel like the movie added much more than what was in the 90-second trailer. I also, as always, had several worldbuilding questions. (My preferred headcanon is that ( spoilers ))

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The Long Walk (2025). In an ambiguously 50s-ish alternate America, fifty young men volunteer to go on the annual death march until the last one walking wins.

This is an adaptation of my favorite Stephen King book of all time. I have a bunch of thoughts on it, but tbh they're kind of all praising with faint damns, because they're essentially quibbles. Overall, this captures the essential spirit and theme of the book so well that quibbles are all I have. In fact, in that regard it's probably one of the closest adaptations of a King novel ever, because so many of them go sooooo far off the rails. The emphasis on the relationships between the walkers, the dreary vibe, the body horror, the horrific brutal deaths: it's all here. The movie changes the ending, in keeping with what I felt was a bit of Hollywood dramatization throughout, but the changes still keep to the spirit of the book's ending, I feel.

I keep thinking I'd like to go see it again before it's out of the theater. We'll see if I manage it. In the meantime, I have had a great time watching interviews with the cast and discussions of how it was made. This is one of those movies where the story of the production is as good as or better than the movie itself. Garrett Wareing, who plays Stebbins, says the cast walked 261 miles in the process of making it. 261 miles!!! He talks about how literally the entire production was mobile: makeup, the food, everything. It just rolled along with the actors. It's also kind of amazing to think about these actors having to do basically ALL their acting while moving. I feel like mostly in movies people aren't having big serious conversations and walking around at the same time. And they filmed the movie chronologically, which IMO really makes sense since they were continuously changing locations and let the actors organically develop their characters and chemistry.

The director is Francis Lawrence, who got started directing Constantine (2005) and has since directed every Hunger Games film except the first one, so he is a big budget guy. This is the lowest-budget movie he's ever directed ($20M). Several people involved have commented it was a passion project for him, and it really shows. His love for the novel might also explain how he ended up directing so many movies for Death Games: The Franchise??

This series of interviews is my favorite I've seen so far, but this interview by the Dead Meat folks has fun stuff too, especially in the second half when everyone has found their footing.

I think this movie is the one I've had the most fun thinking about in a long time.