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amatyultareBack in 2014, I happened across a PacRim fanfic on AO3 with an intriguing description and clever tags.
Then I started reading it and immediately became obsessed. (This is, I gather, a pretty common phenomenon for readers of Designation Congruent with Things and Clean White Room’s work in general.)
So naturally, a fanmix.
This is…a pretty specifically themed mix. The idea is that Newt puts the first half together in a fit of - not emo, he resolutely resists the emo hipster Jedi thing, but melancholy, which is fair, after all, it’s been a rough few weeks, he cannot lie on that front, and so sometimes he just likes to listen to specific songs that resonate with the complexities of his emotional state. Which is fine, and normal, and not emo.
Except that Hermann reads the track list and gives Newt a look that’s a little bit pained and also possibly a tad horrified? And Hermann is wound up tight enough as it is, dude does not need more Geiszler-related angst in his life, so Newt decides to make another playlist of more cheerful songs, or rather to extend his initial playlist. (Hermann points out dryly, when Newt insists on playing the expanded mix to him, that the tone of the second half is not as much ‘cheerful’ as it is “an utterly bizarre mixture of resignation, personal triumphalism, and sentiment”.)
(Hermann pointedly does not ask about the artist duplication, probably because knows that Newt’s explanation will inevitably invoke Descartes.)
Oh man, while I do not claim to be good at it, writing in DCwT!Newt’s voice is SO FUN.
Track list - and illustrative/over-explanatory quotes - below the cut. The original Tumblr post linked to the specific chapters where each quote came from, but the work has since been pulled down from AO3.
01. i’m not me - white rabbits (He begins it already pried apart.)
02. melding of the minds - deltron 3030 feat zack de la rocha (he rides his conviction straight down into something dark and vast and violent and violet, many-eyed, many-consciousnessed, an infinite arachnine incarnation of death destroyer of worlds)
03. broken bones - chvrches (The hivemind. Is it still in there? In here? With him, where he is? Colocalized and integrated? A set of scrambled circuits?)
04. ghouls - we are scientists (Later, when Newt weaves across a semi-dark hotel room […] and sees Hermann, barefoot on the balcony, clutching its rail as though he thinks he’ll fall, he will come to feel, slowly, so guilty he’ll have difficulty ever asking Hermann for anything again)
05. all alright - fun. (They’re filled with rage, they’re dying, they own this secret now, they are lying in the rain unable to get up, what happens if they drink this, all around them are the sounds of closing doors as people leave them.)
06. the orchard - ra ra riot (“I am going to apologize,” Newt says. “In advance and, also, retrospectively.”)
07. cross your fingers - the world record (he’s standing on the beach of his mind holding a sieve and trying to stop a riptide from knocking him over and pulling him under)
08. this red book - pinback (“Or, in other words: ‘is Dr. Newton Geiszler being driven insane by foreign influence or driving himself there instead? An observational study’. Because, honestly? I could see it going either way.”)
09. treason! animals. - franz ferdinand (Something’s putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is, not the cut-up kids with their cognitive acid or the guy they’ve crowned king of their chemical underworld.)
10. 40’ - franz ferdinand (because if the kids in his head were anything other than a memory of undead kaiju, they’d have found a way to kill him by now. They’d fling him off this wall. But he isn’t theirs to fling.)
11. non photo-blue - pinback (it’s not too late; you can save this, you can maybe have a thing with Mako where there’s not a boxing up and a moving on but a thing that maybe stays even after the world didn’t end)
12. you were there too - the world record (There are the nights when Newt can sleep, the dawns he doesn’t see. Of those, there are not many. But there are some.)
13. angel, please - ra ra riot (“I really just need for us to be in a relationship where you never leave me and you also perpetually ensure I’m not ending the world”.)
14. be calm - fun. (Careful, his brain says, like a team player. Careful.)
15. dinosaurs - we are scientists (it must be only Dr. Newton Geiszler of the neuronal debris and the epidermal verdigris who discharges this lien on his cognition in full.)
16. gun - chvrches (I did this, his brain shrieks at him, I was the one who cut them off, the one who destroyed them, the one who sliced into their dead emissaries, the one who submerged still active neural tissue in formalin, and I’d do it again, I’d do it again—)
17. mastermind - deltron 3030 (The meridian of their time passes across the unbridged space between the man who designed the required interface and the man who can best interpret the data it will offer.)
18. the day you won the war - white rabbits (even while he is concerned […], ‘closing the breach’ and ‘no more kaiju,’ are things so monumental that neurological sequelae for himself and also for Hermann seem no more than expenditure line items detailing one more cost in a too-costly war. A war that is over.)
Then I started reading it and immediately became obsessed. (This is, I gather, a pretty common phenomenon for readers of Designation Congruent with Things and Clean White Room’s work in general.)
So naturally, a fanmix.
This is…a pretty specifically themed mix. The idea is that Newt puts the first half together in a fit of - not emo, he resolutely resists the emo hipster Jedi thing, but melancholy, which is fair, after all, it’s been a rough few weeks, he cannot lie on that front, and so sometimes he just likes to listen to specific songs that resonate with the complexities of his emotional state. Which is fine, and normal, and not emo.
Except that Hermann reads the track list and gives Newt a look that’s a little bit pained and also possibly a tad horrified? And Hermann is wound up tight enough as it is, dude does not need more Geiszler-related angst in his life, so Newt decides to make another playlist of more cheerful songs, or rather to extend his initial playlist. (Hermann points out dryly, when Newt insists on playing the expanded mix to him, that the tone of the second half is not as much ‘cheerful’ as it is “an utterly bizarre mixture of resignation, personal triumphalism, and sentiment”.)
(Hermann pointedly does not ask about the artist duplication, probably because knows that Newt’s explanation will inevitably invoke Descartes.)
Track list - and illustrative/over-explanatory quotes - below the cut. The original Tumblr post linked to the specific chapters where each quote came from, but the work has since been pulled down from AO3.
01. i’m not me - white rabbits (He begins it already pried apart.)
02. melding of the minds - deltron 3030 feat zack de la rocha (he rides his conviction straight down into something dark and vast and violent and violet, many-eyed, many-consciousnessed, an infinite arachnine incarnation of death destroyer of worlds)
03. broken bones - chvrches (The hivemind. Is it still in there? In here? With him, where he is? Colocalized and integrated? A set of scrambled circuits?)
04. ghouls - we are scientists (Later, when Newt weaves across a semi-dark hotel room […] and sees Hermann, barefoot on the balcony, clutching its rail as though he thinks he’ll fall, he will come to feel, slowly, so guilty he’ll have difficulty ever asking Hermann for anything again)
05. all alright - fun. (They’re filled with rage, they’re dying, they own this secret now, they are lying in the rain unable to get up, what happens if they drink this, all around them are the sounds of closing doors as people leave them.)
06. the orchard - ra ra riot (“I am going to apologize,” Newt says. “In advance and, also, retrospectively.”)
07. cross your fingers - the world record (he’s standing on the beach of his mind holding a sieve and trying to stop a riptide from knocking him over and pulling him under)
08. this red book - pinback (“Or, in other words: ‘is Dr. Newton Geiszler being driven insane by foreign influence or driving himself there instead? An observational study’. Because, honestly? I could see it going either way.”)
09. treason! animals. - franz ferdinand (Something’s putting tension on his nervous system and searing stereo loathing or stereo longing straight into his head; no one knows which it is, not the cut-up kids with their cognitive acid or the guy they’ve crowned king of their chemical underworld.)
10. 40’ - franz ferdinand (because if the kids in his head were anything other than a memory of undead kaiju, they’d have found a way to kill him by now. They’d fling him off this wall. But he isn’t theirs to fling.)
11. non photo-blue - pinback (it’s not too late; you can save this, you can maybe have a thing with Mako where there’s not a boxing up and a moving on but a thing that maybe stays even after the world didn’t end)
12. you were there too - the world record (There are the nights when Newt can sleep, the dawns he doesn’t see. Of those, there are not many. But there are some.)
13. angel, please - ra ra riot (“I really just need for us to be in a relationship where you never leave me and you also perpetually ensure I’m not ending the world”.)
14. be calm - fun. (Careful, his brain says, like a team player. Careful.)
15. dinosaurs - we are scientists (it must be only Dr. Newton Geiszler of the neuronal debris and the epidermal verdigris who discharges this lien on his cognition in full.)
16. gun - chvrches (I did this, his brain shrieks at him, I was the one who cut them off, the one who destroyed them, the one who sliced into their dead emissaries, the one who submerged still active neural tissue in formalin, and I’d do it again, I’d do it again—)
17. mastermind - deltron 3030 (The meridian of their time passes across the unbridged space between the man who designed the required interface and the man who can best interpret the data it will offer.)
18. the day you won the war - white rabbits (even while he is concerned […], ‘closing the breach’ and ‘no more kaiju,’ are things so monumental that neurological sequelae for himself and also for Hermann seem no more than expenditure line items detailing one more cost in a too-costly war. A war that is over.)
