singedsun

Chocolate Box is live and I got the absolute best gift. It's a wonderful coda to The Last of Us 2 and I'm so so in love with it. There's a lot of TLOU2 spoilers and knowledge and please watch the warnings, I think there should probably also be a warning for suicidal ideation as well.

Afterlife (10288 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Abby/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Characters: Lev (The Last of Us), Abby (The Last of Us), Ellie (The Last of Us)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Canon Divergence, Past Dina/Ellie - Freeform, internalized ableism, Trauma, Recovery, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Past Relationship(s), Canon Lesbian Character, They're all messes, honestly most of this is pre-relationship, they have so far to go to find okay, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to Friends to Lovers
Summary:

“What—” Ellie clears her throat. “What do you do when you’re the shittiest person alive?”

Abby, to Ellie’s surprise, laughs. Really laughs.

“Do you want to fight me for that title?" Abby asks. "Because you literally did, and I gotta say, you lost.”

With time being as it is and my work from home routine into something that resembles actual routines from the before times, I've started getting really into watching longer form videos on YouTube. Previously, if a long form video hit I'd add it to a watch later playlist that never got watched later. But sitting in the home office by myself during the day is lonesome, especially when I'm busy so videos have won out over podcasts (even video podcasts).

A few weeks ago, sewn did a round-up of YouTubers and I've been wanting to do something similar but I thought for at least this post I'd narrow it down a little bit to a certain kind of video. In this instance, the video essayist. (Maybe there's a better word for that, I don't know.) In my case this started with like A guy I watched from time to time, but in the last few months I've added quite a few to that list. These aren't people who do sketches or vlogs or review type videos. These are the people who pick a topic and do long, in-depth videos on them sometimes to the tune of full feature length documentaries worth of time and effort. I think on average the people I watch are putting out 20-30 minutes worth of content every week. The topics range from movies/film to art or video games to philosophy. The one that spurred me to make this post today happens to be about the history of gay porn. Go figure.

I'll stick these behind a cut, but I linked the one from James Somerton above so if that at all caught your attention you could just go watch a really interesting hour and a half documentary about gay adult films without having to go anywhere. James does these really thoughtful pieces about gay media, I posted one a few weeks ago that he'd done about the history of queer coding in horror. He also recently did one about the queer coding of Disney villains. He doesn't have a lot of content on his channel and you might guess based on his subject matter, his videos often get copystriked or soft-blocked from YouTube despite fair use and fairly clean language given his focus on gay issues. I'm hoping his more recent content is indicative of more regular content but there's a dozen or so hours of video there to watch already.

I tried to leave some of the more popular creators like Lindsay Ellis, hbomberguy and PhilosophyTube, Contrapoints, ect. off this list. Not everyone here has impeccable narrative voice or super slick editing or sets. They're for the most part, smaller creators who I think could stand up against these longer-standing, better-known channels. But if you don't watch much YouTube there are definitely bigger channels out there worth looking up.

( The rest are below the cut )

I feel like this list is both too many and not enough? There are others on my list but I haven't watched enough of their content to feel good about making a recommendation on them yet. I also do follow a lot more people who tackle both video games, and horror movies very specifically so I didn't want to do a whole post about only one kind of video essayist. Hopefully this is a good mix of long and short content from a variety of topics and you'll find someone, or at least some video here worth watching.

Let me know if you have other recommendations for me too. I know that the great YouTube algorithm has a bad habit of amplifying a certain kind of voice - leaning most often to young white men. I feel like I have a good mix of voices, but I'm always digging for more.

Day 12 was to create a challenge of our own. Since I've been listening to, revisiting and making quite a few fanmixes lately, I thought I could create a little music challenge.

Pick a song a song you strongly associate with a character and/or pairing and post it below and tell me why. It doesn't have to be a long explanation, I know plenty of times I hear something and I don't know why but it just immediately feels like it belongs to a certain character. It could be a song that makes you inspired to write about a character. It could be something that relates to their backstory. It could be something that makes you think of their relationship with another character. If you can't think of one, that's okay too, post a song you've really been loving lately. (This can be for fandoms or OCs, up to you.)

I have two, one for a character and one for a ship.

First is "Is It Me" by St. Paul & the Broken Bones. This song is on a short playlist I put together for Lucifer from the television show of the same name. His character arc in the last two seasons have gotten more introspective, which I've really loved. I feel like this song has a pretty good hold on that vibe.

"St. Paul & The Broken Bones - Is It Me" (Watch on YouTube)

Second is "Sinkhole" by Old Sea Brigade. I've been listening to the official Fjord & Jester playlists from Travis and Laura lately and reflecting on their relationship a lot. I was all for Fjord/Jester in the beginning but I've been really interested in this uncertainty from Jester and curiosity from Fjord in the last few episodes. With Jester's line this week, "Don't turn evil to me, Fjord," I think this song really applies.

"Sinkhole" (Watch on YouTube)

I hope you do this too. I love getting new music recs and learning how other people associate music and their writing or art.