Before anyone comes in and overreacts about specific players, this is just a thread devoted to judging our teams potential for the upcoming split. Criticism is warranted as with any competitive fixture.
TOP: Fudge. As someone who came in and talked a lot, and I mean A LOT of smack. This was bound to backfire if he didn't 1v9 every game. Though his overall tournament performance was well below expectations. He still showed potential throughout some games including against Alphari in the last series. He is not the best top laner, he is not a top 3, top laner. But he hasn't been the worst IMO. If you dissect his performances, he was usually weakside and put in positions to be more utilitarian. When he was given the spotlight to succeed like in his Cam games vs TSM or game 4 vs TL he can really take over and show why he deserves a spot on C9. That said, it can backfire and in the case of game 5, did.
Further assessment: His hot/cold performances are no guarantee going into the regular season and he definitely needs to improve his early game laneing phase or else be put on tank duty. He is the youngest player in the LCS and has shown very good mechanical and late game team fighting ability and IMO has a lot of room, and time to grow. Don't write him off, the dude needs all the confidence he can get to fulfil his potential.
​
Jungle: Blaber is a maniac. IMO he put all doubters aside with deep champion pool and his superior routing ability against other top junglers like Santorin and Closer and was a big reason we stayed competitive in our losses. The man is coming into this season not just to play, but to win. I would not be surprised if he makes an MVP run this Spring.
Mid: Perkz. The man is joining C9 after playing bot for the greatest western team G2 for the last year and a half. To expect him to come straight in and dominate with only mere weeks worth of practice in a role that he hasn't played in nearly a year was hopeful at best. But throughout this tournament his worth was still felt even though he was taking a more supportive role. His mechanics IMO look better than any mid in the tournament and he definitely got more comfortable as the preseason went on. The man is on pace to put C9 on top when his full potential is realized.
Bot: Zven and Vulcan are amazing. Up to the finals they looked as though they where back in Spring of 2020. Zven IMO displayed himself as the best ADC while Vulcan is a razors edge close to CoreJJ for the top spot in the support position. This is definitely a major area of strength along with Jungle and should be are win conditions early on in the regular season.
The team as a whole: Optimistic. As odd as it may sound right now, if Fudge can iron out his early game detriments and continue his mid-late game abilities, he can easily become one of the best players on C9 considering he is only 18. Perkz IMO already sits at the best midlaner in NA with his performances against Jensen being far more impressive and 'felt' in the series. The man is at the top of the mountain, but baby he is only halfway there! Our Jungle and Bot positions are 1, 2 at worst and 1, 1 at best. 0 concerns.
Last words, it is fair to say C9 is the second best team right now coming out of the lock-in tournemnt with A LOT to work on. But the gap between us and TL was proven to be miniscule and feels a lot closer than what people are making it out to be.
Lets hold off on writing this team off from a preseason tournament. The competition in NA is at its greatest and we should be thankful to see it. Lets cheer on C9 in 2021 and give our boys the best chance at winning by supporting them as BEST WE CAN!

Original post created by FlagstaffMom in https://www.reddit.com/flagstaffacademy/.

Supplements

• Board of Directors Meeting Agenda 2019-03-19 - Sheet1 (1)
• 2019-2020 Master Calendar for Approval

Summary

Some highlights from the meeting are: The April Board meeting has been rescheduled. Instead of being held on Tuesday, April 2nd, it will be held on Monday, April 8th. 2019-2020 Calendar Modifications:

• School will start on Wednesday, August 14th, one day later than usual.
• The elementary school will move to a quarterly system as opposed to the trimester system in the past.
• Parent teacher conferences in the spring will be pushed forward to just before Spring Break.

The Budget Draft presented at the meeting was not posted online so I couldn't see the details. There was a high level overview discussion of the line items, which you can read further in the notes. Budget Discussion Highlights:

• Linda Arnold will be retiring in June. Kim McCain will be taking over the work with Abstract Insights.
• The school would like to hire a full time Behavioral Interventionist. There is no space in the building for the person with this position so they will likely carve out a section of the elementary art room since there are no longer big installations in there. However, there would be no HVAC or sprinklers so money would have to be spent to make accommodations for that. Estimates on that are coming in around $40,000 because of the mechanical aspects of that change.
• FA's liability and property insurance, which includes Chromebook insurance, is going up 52% due to all of the recent natural disasters and the like. In 2017, the pool paid out more claims than the previous four years combined so they depleted their reserves and this is them passing that on to us.
• Bids are being put out for a new custodial service because they have not been happy with the service.

Detailed Notes

1. Opening
2. Call to Order
3. Pledge of Allegiance, Roll Call, Recital of Mission Statement
   1. Board members present: Bob, Cary, Leah, Kumar, Stuart (late 5:31pm)
4. Public Comment
   1. None
5. Recognitions and Appreciations
   1. Pancake Breakfast was a big success.
6. Approval of Agenda
   1. MOTION: Leah motioned to approve the Board of Directors Meeting Agenda for March 19, 2019. Kumar seconded.
   2. Discussion: None
   3. VOTE: Vote on the motion as amended. The ayes have it and the motion carries.

II. Board / Administrative Working Session

1. Propose to change the meeting from Tuesday, April 2nd to Monday, April 8th. Leah made a motion to change the meeting and Cary seconded it. Vote on the motion passed.

III. General Working Session

1. 2019/2020 Master School Calendar
   1. Teachers preferred the one day later than the district start of school. We will have more time for teacher inservice. Katie said that she thought the Middle School Back to School night was supposed to be pushed to the next week, but that is not reflected on the calendar. Katie suggests moving the New Middle Schoolers day to the way it usually is, being the day before school starts. Cary asks how they received feedback from the teachers. Wayne says that the principals met with the team leads and got feedback that way. Katie says that the elementary school wants to go to quarters instead of trimesters, so we’re going to do that now. It will have more continuity with the conferences and more continuity with the middle school. Most elementaries in the school district on the trimester, but most schools aren’t K-8. There will be an additional grading period for teachers, but it doesn’t have that big of an impact. Conferences in the spring will be pushed out a bit to just before Spring Break. Kumar asks Wayne if, based on his experience, parents will be ok with this. Wayne says yes and explains that he has talked to some parents about it and they generally want to do what is best for teachers and kids. Leah moves to approve the calendar and Cary seconds the motion. It passes.
2. 2019/2020 Budget
   1. The budget draft was not posted online and I cannot read the screen.
   2. Linda Arnold will be done working (retiring) in June for all of her schools. Her youngest is graduating high school. Kim McCain is working for Abstract Insights. Linda reviewed Kim’s experience and explains that Kim will be the new Linda. They are working on transitioning work over now. Kim will attend the finance committee meeting tomorrow.
   3. Wayne says that the Budget Draft they’re showing on the screen is super high level. Wayne explains that the vote will occur on April 8th and that this is just for discussion. If the Board wants clarity on anything, Wayne can bring that on April 8th.
   4. Currently, we are almost 15 students up from this year in terms of enrollment. We know that we have loss over the summer, but he is being conservative for us not to have a hit. Tuition (Kindergarten) - He knows there are discussions where Gov. Polis wants to fund full day kindergarten. We would not charge our parents for full day kindergarten in that case. We would gain a few hundred dollars potentially if that happens, which would be a bonus.
   5. Dragon Flight tuition is awesome. We’re bumping that up a bit to be more consistent. It averages right around $25,000/month (school year months - 10 months)
   6. We get around $30,000 in interest income for the amount in our account.
   7. We left activity fees at 85%, although it has been decreasing every year. We are going to get more proactive on finding ways for that to come back in, even if it’s from Wayne himself.
   8. Pingree for 5th grade trip is consistent.
   9. Summer camp - There is a slight dip here because we are shortening the summer camp. We can’t clean until summer camp is over.
   10. Sports and Athletics - we’ve captured everything we can for kids to do track, etc.
   11. Chromebook fees
   12. We should see an increase in mill levy. These are based on our enrollment in 2008. If our enrollment takes a hit, we’re ok.
   13. PTO came in with $45,000 this year. Wayne and Jolene had their monthly meeting today. $20,000 hasn’t been asked for from staff for this year, so they’re going to roll it over to next year, so that number will increase to $65,000. They could adjust that based on the Gala. Cary asks if something else could be done with that money? Wayne mentions that they’d talk about that in the expenses. Kumar asks if the number could be increased. Discussion. The amount listed is the amount the PTO promised to us.
   14. Capital Construction is funding that the state gives to charter schools to help for facilities, but it is minimal.
   15. Net increase to revenue around $358,000.
   16. Expenses - Targeting 90% - 95% of SVVSD. They accounted for 93% of the district. Peak to Peak is only at 90%. They added in a Behavior Interventionist position, which he will talk about in a minute. Wayne is passing out a historical salary data sheet so the Board can see what they have spent in salaries and see the change over the years. He mentions a bonus and stipends for when people do amazing work. He says he has been doing that for years, so there are people recognized every year. He is explaining on the numbers on that sheet correspond to the numbers on the budget draft. The actual change in budget is $251,000 from last year to this year. Bob asks what it would be if we went to 95%. Wayne says about another $70-some thousand.
   17. Wayne explains that there is a difference between counselors and Behavior Interventionists. We need someone who really knows how to talk with teachers to build the classroom environment. Katie explains that we really need this help at school because others are being pulled from their tasks that they need to do. It would be a full time job that would pay around $45,000 - $50,000. Katie says that kids are coming in and are not able to manage their emotions. We don’t have anyone on staff that necessarily has that qualification. We need someone on the staff to help the students and help train us on what we need to do and how we can handle this. Wayne says that only the Tier 3 students are getting that special ed service, but other kids are not being served and are outside of what we do. Katie says that trauma informed teaching is really big right now and we need to address it when the kids are young to avoid consequences when they are older. Adams and Douglas Counties are hiring a lot of these types of positions for their school districts. Katie explains that with technological devices, kids are coming in with less social and emotional skills, and we need to deal with that.
   18. Increasing Paid Time Off Hours. Wayne says this will help accommodate substitute teachers time.
   19. Increase in PERA and Health Insurance
   20. Wayne is starting to skim through due to the lack of time.
   21. Wayne says we are sending out a bid for a new custodial contract because we have not been happy with the custodial service.
   22. Liability Insurance, which includes chromebook insurance, our liability and property insurance is going up 52% (!!!) due to all of the natural disasters and the like. In 2017, the pool paid out more claims than the previous four years combined so they depleted their reserves and this is them passing that on to us. Wayne has talked with others to get quotes from new providers and asked about moving around coverages and deductibles. He is working to get that down. Stuart asks if that is expected to go down. Wayne mentions how the hail storms are just decimating properties.
   23. Talk about how some of these categories are combined (for example, the way Dragon Flight field trips are categorized with other things) and Kumar asks if we should break these out. Wayne said the categories are chosen by the CDE so we can’t change those.
   24. The rest of the district services are just slight changes. There may be an increase in Tech because district technology is getting new costs as well.
   25. Everything else is fairly flat.
   26. Furniture and fixtures has a big drop because of all that we did this year.
   27. Stuart asks if there are any large expenses coming up to consider. Carpet will need to be replaced, which we’ll start looking at toward the end of this year. Wayne mentions that there is no space for someone like a Behavioral Interventionists, so we may carve out some space from the art room since there are no longer big installations. However, there would be no HVAC or sprinklers so we would have to spend the money to make accommodations for that. Estimates on that are coming in around $40,000 because of the mechanical aspects of that. Kumar asks about the lawn. Wayne says we’re still dealing with that and we’ll have to see.
   28. We need to submit a budget to the district by April 15th. The budget the Board has to approve isn’t until May. Until we get true PPR, we won’t truly know these numbers. In June, we’ll set PPR, but enrollment won’t be set until October. Leah mentions that the budget is typically amended at the beginning of the next school year. Linda encourages questions now though, if there are any, so that they can be answered now. Wayne wants everyone to know we’re on track for the 90% - 95% to match SVVSD.

IV. Consent Agenda
V. Executive Session
VI. Closing

1. Action Item Review
2. Adjournment

This weekend the top two women's leagues in England, the Women's Super League and Women's Championship kick off. To mark that occasion I decided to do a mini write up on every PL's related women's club for those of you that are curious about your own club's women's team or all the clubs' sides.
After following Spurs for about a decade, I decided a few years ago that I didn't have enough whiplash from near successes and wanted to add their women's team to the mix, which at the time was in the 3rd division. The ensuing years have been mostly upds as they've gone from the (mostly) amateur game (National League), to the semi-pro/pro 2nd division (Championship), to finally their first ever season in the fully professional Women's Super League.
While the results were great, it also has been really rewarding to get to know names that were servants to the club that they and I love but fans likely will never had heard of or will hear of. Case in point is the recently retired Jenna Schicalli who was born and raised a Spurs fan, recently ending her last stint with the team from 2009-2020 in which she helped captain the team through multiple promotions, including the two I just spoke of. It's interesting to hear the perspective of players that are playing simply for the love of the game and club, since often times they have to have another job to supplement the little income they get outside of the top flight.
Following the ups and downs of the women's team has been rewarding for me, getting at times either double the joy from victories across the club or double the pain from defeats on the same weekend. But either way it was more football for me, and that's part of why I love the women's game. Maybe you will be in the same place as me and maybe not, but I figured at the very least this sort of post may pique your curiosity to see where your women's side sits in the pyramid in comparison to the men's side in the PL. Are they also in the top flight? Not far out in the Championship? Or down in the regional leagues?
I'll be trying to provide a brief summary for where each team is at, and due to a lack of info and familiarity some teams (especially the lower league teams) won't have the most info but I'll do my best!
It should be noted that the 3rd tier and below had their seasons cancelled with no pro/rel, whereas the WSL and Championship had their seasons canceled but PPG was still used to decide pro/rel and Champions League places. So that's why some teams were promoted and relegated while other first or last finishers didn't move at all.

FAQ

What competitions are going on this season?

• Leagues - Women's Super League, Championship, and the National League, and all the way down to the regional tiers (5th-7th)
  
• FA Cup(s) (19/20 & 20/21) The 19/20 FA Cup was postponed during the quarterfinals in March, they'll be played out in the next couple of months while the early stages of the 20/21 FA Cup are also being played
  
• League Cup - The primary League Cup in the vein of the men's competition and is competed between teams in the professional and semi-professional leagues, the Women's Super League and Championship respectively. The national and regional leagues below also have their own similar competitions going, much like the men's game.
  
• Champions League - Chelsea and Manchester City will be competing from the Round of 32 onward this season. Note that the format of the women's CL will be changing next season to more closely align with the men's competition, and England will have 3 spots in the competition as opposed to the current 2.
  

How can I watch the leagues? (Inside and outside the UK)

If you're in the UK WSL matches will be broadcast on BT Sport and BBC iPlayeRed Button. The rest will be free to view with an account on the FA Player website. Currently only one Championship match a week will be streamed, though all WSL and Championship matches will be available to be viewed on demand in the FA Player website.
Outside the UK, the answer is similar to the answer I just provided, substituting BT Sport and BBC for other TV broadcasters in select nations. If your country/region doesn't have a TV deal, all WSL matches and will be available live for free on the FA Player!
When it comes to the lower leagues, some teams have streamed matches but it's largely absent from the women's game outside of the top league(s).

Where can I talk about the leagues?

/FAWSL has been restarted and is gaining traction as a place to discuss all the relevant clubs and matches. There are women's club subreddits for some of the large teams, but it seems that most PL club subreddits are open to women's team news being posted there as well.

Arsenal

Current League: WSL (1st tier) | 19/20 finish: 3rd/12
As much as I hate to say it, one of the titans of the English women's game. Arsenal are ever-present around the CL spots (fitting for the only English team to actually win the competition), though last year they finished just outside a CL spot in 3rd place on PPG as the WSL season was decided early. They'll only have domestic competition to focus on this year, and that may end up being to their benefit. Having arguably the best women's player in the world in Vivianne Miedema doesn't hurt either, with the 24 year old still improving year after year.
Opening fixture: Arsenal vs Reading - 6th September 12:30 BST – Watch live for free on the FA Player
FA Cup 2019/20: Arsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur on 26th/27th September - Watch live on BBC iPlayer and BBC Red Button

Aston Villa

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 1st/11 in Championship on PPG (Promoted)
The lone promoted side in this year's league, taking Liverpool's place. Villa will be aiming to stay in the WSL and will likely achieve that with (relative) ease, looking at the improvement from this off-season on their already strong Championship squad.
Opening fixtures: Aston Villa 0-2 Manchester City - 5th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player (International)
Reading vs Aston Villa - 13th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player

Brighton & Hove Albion

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 9th/12 in WSL; 19/20 FA Cup quarterfinal vs Birmingham City on 26/27 September
Brighton are still relatively fresh blood in the WSL, only joining in 18/19 as one of two promotions during the restructuring of the top two leagues. They finished 9th/11 in their first season after promotion from WSL 2 (now Championship) and last season didn't get a chance to prove they had improved, finishing 9th/12. They likely don't have anything to fear in regards to relegation, with their seasoned squad having a lot of professional experience by now, but with how other teams around them have been improving you likely won't see them climb much higher up the table.
Opening fixture: Brighton & Hove Albion vs Birmingham City - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Brighton & Hove Albion vs Birmingham City - 26th/27th September

Burnley

Current League: FA Women's National League North (Premier Division) [3rd tier] | 19/20 finish: 5th/12
Following back to back promotions from the 5th tier in 17/18 and 4th tier in 18/19, Burnely found themselves playing just a single step below the semi-professional game. They finished a surprising 5th with a few matches in hand on some of the teams above them, but there likely would have been no catching league leaders Sunderland who had yet to lose a match in 14 played.
Opening fixture: Sunderland AFC Ladies v Burnley FC Women on Sunday 20th September

Chelsea

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 1st/12 in WSL (Champs), 19/20 League Cup Champs
One of the standard bearers for women's club football in England, Chelsea won their first league title since 2017-18 (not the longest wait, eh?) Chelsea will be aiming to once again win the league as well as to reach their first ever Champions League final. Chelsea have reached the semi-finals in their last two attempts (17/18 & 18/19) but were knocked out by Wolfsburg and Lyon, two of the most dominant sides in women's Champions League history.
Adding Danish women's national team captain Pernille Harder this summer for a world record transfer fee in women's football probably will help give them a slight boost in the league and CL. That's in addition to Sam Kerr who Chelsea added in the second half of 2019. The Australian at age 26 is already the all time leading scorer in two leagues, NWSL in the United States and W-League in Australia.
Opening fixture: Manchester United vs Chelsea - 6th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)
FA Cup 2019/20: Everton vs Chelsea on 26th/27th September

Crystal Palace

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 9th/11
Palace joined the WSL 2 (now Championship) in 2018/19 during the restructuring of the 1st and 2nd women's divisions, gaining their spot through an application. They had finished 3rd in their league so they weren't slouches, but they still have yet to break through to midtable of the Championship. They finished 10th/11 in their first foray in the 2nd division, below all four of the other newly promoted sides including Sheffield United who were actually a division below them in 17/18. They didn't get to prove themselves much better than that in 19/20, only finishing one place higher when the season was cut short this past spring. All that said, they have added players with WSL and Championship experience and should hopefully finish at least mid-table in this upcoming Championship season.
Opening fixture: Charlton Athletic vs Crystal Palace - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*

Everton

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 6th/12; 19/20 FA Cup quarter-final vs Chelsea 26/27 September
Everton finished midtable last year but their 10 additions between spring (3) and summer (7) may have them either on the outskirts of a Champions League spot if everything clicks or stalling or falling in the table due to needing time to click. French forward Valerie Gauvin is likely the new addition to watch in their squad.
Opening fixture: Bristol City vs Everton - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Everton vs Chelsea on 26th/27th September

Fulham

Current League: London and South East Women's Regional Football League (5th) | 19/20 finish: 5th/10
The lowest division representative in this list, Fulham have a storied history, one with the highest of highs and lowest of lows. Highlights include in 2000 they were the first full-time professional women's side and a 2003 FA Cup victory. Sadly the team was dissolved twice in four years (2006 & 2010), not reforming until 2014 as Fulham FC Foundation ladies. Fulham have been in the 5th tier since 14/15, winning promotion from the 6th tier the previous season. They finished a surprising 4th/10 in their first season in the top flight, but haven't been able to finish past 5th, routinely in the lower half of the table though not needing to stave off relegation. The team has been receiving more and more attention and from the main club notably becoming Fulham FC Women in 2018 with reinvestment in the team, and that may lead to improved results this upcoming season and hopefully promotion in the near future.
Opening fixture: Denham United vs Fulham FC on Sunday 13th September

Leeds United

Current league: National League Division One North (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 2nd/12
Leeds United were among the top sides fighting for promotion, the closest challenger to Barnsley when the season was called off. It is expected that they should be able to repeat that effort this season. The club has yet to reach the semi-professional game, and finally exiting the 4th tier would be a huge step in achieving progress to that goal.
Opening fixture: Norton & Stockton vs Leeds United on 20 September

Leicester City

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 6th
Leicester City was brought into the fold of the main club, going from a partner to being integrated as one of only a few fully professional clubs in the Championship. They'll likely be fighting with Liverpool and Sheffield for the one promotion spot, and one shouldn't doubt their capabilities in winning it all.
They're the lone 2nd division team left in the 2019/20 FA Cup, though with just about the toughest draw, facing the defending champs Manchester City.
Opening fixture: Leicester City vs Blackburn Rovers - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Leicester City vs Manchester City 26th/27th September

Liverpool

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 12th/12 in WSL (Relegated)
Lot of criticism has been swirling around this team, some just and unjust, but even the main club could understand that the men winning the league and the women being relegated in the same season wasn't the best look. Sure, the fact that they went on PPG in a season that didn't complete didn't give them a fair shake, but they'll have to prove this season that they truly belong in the WSL. In Leicester City and Sheffield United they have very strong opponents in the fight for promotion.
Opening fixture: Liverpool vs Durham on Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch for free on the FA Player*

Manchester City

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 2nd/12 in WSL
Perennial 2nd place finishers in recent years, outside of a league win in 2016, City have finished 2nd every season since 2015. Losing this past season on PPG has to be one of the more bitter pills to swallow, but after a 2-0 loss to Chelsea for the newly revived Women's Community Shield this past weekend, City will be hoping that their new recruits including Sam Mewis and Rose Lavelle, 2019 World Cup winners with the United States, will help push them past the hurdle of 2nd place as well as give them a boost in Europe. Similar to Chelsea, they have yet to reach a Champions League final, only making it to the Round of 32 and Round of 16 in the last two seasons, getting knocked out by Atletico Madrid both years.
Opening fixture: Aston Villa 0-2 Manchester City - 5th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)
Manchester City vs Brighton & Hove Albion - 13th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Leicester City vs Manchester City 26th/27th September

Manchester United

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 4th/12 in WSL on PPG
The best of the rest outside of the top 3, which is pretty good for a team in only its 3rd season of existence. They easily won the Championship in 18/19 with only 1 draw and 1 loss and their first year in the WSL saw them continue their impressive form. This year they're aiming to challenge for the Champions League, though it should be said that last year there was a clear gap between them and a CL spot with 4th placed United getting 1.64 PPG while Arsenal in 3rd had 2.40.
The Red Devils hope that the additions of World Champions Tobin Heath and Cristen Press will propel them to a Champions League spot this year, finally breaking into the top 3 of the WSL after a long wait of...3 years.
Opening fixture: Manchester United vs Chelsea - 6th September 14:30 BST - Watch live on BT Sport (UK), or free on the FA Player* (International)

Newcastle United

Current League: National League Division One North (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 6th/12
Newcastle had been in the 3rd division as recently as 2016/17 when they were relegated after gaining only 7 points in 20 matches. They have yet to truly challenge for promotion back into the 3rd tier, finishing 5th, 9th, and 6th in their seasons after relegation. Most recently the team entered into a partnership with Northumbria University to provide Strength and Conditioning, Performance Analysis and Physiotherapy as well as management of the club itself.
Opening fixture: Durham Cestria vs Newcastle United on Sunday 20th September

Sheffield United

Current League: Championship | 19/20 finish: 2nd/11
Sheffield finished under Aston Villa in PPG and it's a wonder where the two teams would have finished in a full season. That said, their solid base has been improved upon roster wise, but the loss of manager Carla Ward to WSL side Birmingham City may be the largest challenge to the club. They took their time in replacing her, and it'll be up to former Liverpool Women and Newcastle United U23 manager Neil Redfearn to keep up with Leicester and Liverpool.
Opening fixture: London City Lionesses vs Sheffield United - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch replay for free on the FA Player*

Southampton

Current League: National League Division One South West (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 1st/11
After back to back promotions from the 6th tier in 17/18 and 5th tier in 18/19, Southampton FC Women were looking to establish themselves in their first season in the 4th division. They ended up fighting with similarly named Southampton Women's F.C. for promotion to the 3rd tier, but with only 11 and 12 matches played respectively, it's a wonder who would have been the side to clinch the league. Southampton's official women's side should expect to be the favorites going into this season, but time will tell for how things add up.
Opening fixture: Poole Town vs Southampton FC on Sunday 20th September

Tottenham Hotspur

Current League: WSL | 19/20 finish: 7th/12;
Spurs are a contrast to Manchester United, both being promoted to the WSL the same year but under quite different circumstances. After years in the lower tiers Spurs were able to get a bit more investment to add to some of their longterm players. After each subsequent season they've retooled their squad with each season, exemplified by the fact that Josie Green is the only remaining player on the squad that played with the team in the amateur game. Speaking of that time, Spurs' results truly bloomed in 2016/17 when they won four trophies, including promotion to the 2nd division. They finished 7th place in 2017/18, their first semi-professional season, the highlight being securing their first ever victories over top flight sides in cup competitions. The 2018/19 saw them rocket up the table, finishing 2nd and in a promotion spot under the juggernauts of Manchester United. Their first WSL season followed a similar pattern to their first WSL 2 season, once again finishing 7th and they're still waiting to play in their furthest advanced round in the FA Cup, a quarter-final with Arsenal.
I'm dreading Spurs' match vs Arsenal in the FA Cup later this month, but I am happy when I look back on prior results and see all the progress that has been made. Spurs had an infamous 10-0 loss to Arsenal in the Round of 16 back in 2016/17 when they were an amateur side, but when facing them in league play this past season 2 1/2 years later, they only lost 2-0. They're still looking for that first win over a top half side in the WSL, but with a season of WSL under the squad and management's belt, they should be able to achieve an upper mid-table finish and hopefully be an increasingly challenging fixture against the top sides.
Opening fixture: Tottenham Hotspur vs West Ham - 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*
FA Cup 2019/20: Arsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur on 26th/27th September - Watch live on BBC iPlayer and BBC Red Button

West Bromwich Albion

Current League: National League Premier Division North (3rd tier) | 19/20 finish: 7th/12
West Brom have had a brief yo-yo situation as of late, finishing 6th in their division 16/17, relegated from the 3rd tier in 17/18, winning back promotion 18/19, and seeming to settle back into midtable in 19/20. At this point it seems they should be focusing on stability and remaining in the 3rd division.
Opening fixture: West Bromwich Albion vs Nottingham Forest on Sunday 20th September

West Ham United

Current league: WSL | 19/20 finish: 8th/12
West Ham are another team that's relatively new to the WSL, making the surprising jump from the 3rd tier amateur game all the way to the professional game in 2018/19, bypassing the Championship when the FA was restructuring the leagues. They settled right into midtable in their first WSL season with a 7th place finish, the highlight being a surprising FA Cup final appearance in what ended up a 3-0 loss to Man City. The next season saw them stay in just about the same place, finishing 8th on PPG. As the team has brought in more players on a permanent or temporary loan basis, West Ham will be looking to finish in the upper midtable and challenge fellow midtable sides as well as the CL contenders more evenly.
Opening fixture: Tottenham Hotspur vs West Ham - Sunday 6th September 14:00 BST - Watch live for free on the FA Player*

Wolverhampton Wanderers

Current League: National League Division One Midlands (4th tier) | 19/20 finish: 1st/12
One of the victims of the lower leagues getting cancelled with no pro/rel, Wolverhampton were running away with their league on 14 wins, 1 loss, and an incredible +73 goal differntial when the season was cancelled. Wolves will hope to repeat their dominance but this time with a complete season and the reward of promotion to the 3rd tier, just a league below the Championship.
Opening fixture: Leafield Athletic vs Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday 20th September
Hope that was interesting to folks, let me know if I got anything wrong or you have any questions. There will be match threads on /FAWSL for some of the matches today, hope you join in on the discussion if your team is playing!

I didn’t know David for very long but I wouldn’t be alive, if it weren’t for him.
The internship was supposed to change my life for the better. It was going to score me my dream job, and finally, some decent pay. Instead, I’m paralyzed and laying in my childhood bedroom, being waited on by my mother like I’m a toddler again.
The fucking flyer was on a bulletin board at my college. Students with interest in government related fields were encouraged to look into “The Leaders Initiative,” a program hailed as the best way to guarantee your future. I took the bait, and that's where I met him. Neither of us had any clue what we were actually getting ourselves into.
“I’m assisting a government funded research team,” I told my parents.
“Cooool,” my dad said, still staring at his model airplane.
“My boy’s so smart,” my mother replied, smiling at me from behind a cigarette.
“Your parents sound nice, Connor,” David said after I shared the story with him. I wasn’t sure how we’d even started speaking. I’ve never been good at talking to people, so the fact that I was already this far into a conversation was beginning to feel like a lot of pressure. I wanted friends desperately, but it sometimes felt like everyone around me could pick up on that. That day, we were seated in a cold meeting room, waiting for our final interview to begin.
“Do you know what we’re actually gonna be doing?” I asked him.
“Not sure,” he replied. “This place, it’s interesting,” he answered, running his fingers across the marble table we were seated at. The interior of the building was quite contemporary, and to a kid in his early twenties, intimidating as well. A woman wearing a brown pantsuit, with her hair tied up neatly in a bun, entered the room with a clipboard and pen in hand.
“Good morning,” she began. “Our team has concluded all background and reference checks, and I would like to officially welcome you to the leader's initiative. As you may already be aware, the nature of this job is top secret, and any failure to maintain it as such will end in criminal charges. The information shared with you is done so in confidence, that being said, your interaction with classified data, patients, and tools, extraplanar or not, will be minimal. In twenty four hours, we will be taking a flight to Ithaca, New York. It is expected to be an extended stay, and therefore, will require that you pack your belongings accordingly. Due to the sensitive nature of this project, you will be required to have a one on one, weekly session with an onsight psychologist. Failure to do so is considered a non-compliance violation, and will end in your termination. Are there any questions?” David and I exchanged nervous expressions before shaking our heads, no. “Great. Welcome aboard,” she concluded, feigning a smile before escorting us out of the room.
Ithaca was a beautiful town. After our plane landed, we were driven through the Cornell University campus where we were able to see the college buildings and lightly forested surroundings. Our driver was silent as we made our way through a populated area of town, and began heading south, toward a more rural piece of the state.
“Goodbye civilization,” David joked. I laughed nervously, for the first time, feeling an odd sense of discomfort about the job.
We exited the car a short while later, now standing outside of a small brick building with no windows.
“What is this place?” David whispered to me, curious how a building so small could house an entire research team.
The driver unlocked and opened the front door of the building, beckoning for us to enter.
“Oh… thanks,” I said, cautiously making my way inside of the dim structure. Once David had crossed the threshold behind me, the door shut, and a whirring noise began to emit from beneath our feet.
“What the fuck?” he yelled abruptly, pointing up at the ceiling. The walls around us had begun to rise higher and higher into the air. It wasn’t until the brick turned into solid concrete that I realized we had been standing on an elevator, rather than the building magically growing in height. Bulbs that had been built into the walls clicked on as we made our way deeper, lighting up the massive tunnel above our heads. Finally, the floor had stopped and a steel door was positioned in front of us. When it opened, a man with a lab coat, and only a few remaining grey hairs, greeted us.
“My… name is Dr. Lahee. Your work will begin... shortly. First… you can take your belongings into your bunk. Just this way,” he explained, not looking up from his binder of notes even once. After storing our luggage in our rooms, which appeared only slightly better than a standard prison cell, we followed the doctor into a cold office space of cubicles. Everything in the room was outdated by about fifteen years, but also, completely unused. Only two desks out of about thirty were occupied by other employees, who were silent as they peeked up nervously from their desks.
“Choose... whichever desk suits you. Your transcriptions are expected to be accurate... and properly punctuated,” he began with his odd pattern of speaking and overly soft voice. “We have… a large load of verbal recordings from our study.”
“We’re typing out voice recordings?” David asked.
“You’ll start at 9PM every day and… finish around 6AM. Good luck,” he said as he turned to leave, finally putting his notes away as if he’d been reading from a script the entire time. I looked over at David who seemed surprised by the nature of the interaction and I shrugged.
“Let’s get started I guess?” I suggested. As David disappeared behind the wall of my cubicle, I sat back in my brand new swivel chair and pressed down on the computer’s power button.
“Welcome, new Liminal Inc. employee!” A graphic read, stretched uncomfortably across my monitor. Without any warning, the screen immediately split into two sections. The left half contained a list of documents to be processed, as well as a section for the waveform of an audio log. The right side was a simple blank note screen, waiting patiently to be typed upon. I inserted the earbuds neatly wrapped up next to the keyboard, and clicked on the first listed document, titled simply by the date it was generated on.
“August 16th, 2020,” a bored sounding man began. “Patient, Jane-34 Alpha, Beta, Beta, remains stable but is untethered to a remote. Recommending that we move on. Neural oscillation patterns are as follows:
8:32PM - 1880wpc
8:34PM - 1904wpc
8:36PM - 1891wpc…”
The recording droned on with various measurements I couldn’t understand, and I did my best to make sure I got every detail written accurately.
When I’d finally looked over at the clock for the first time that night, it was already 5:52 AM.
“Holy…” I whispered to myself, standing up from my desk and rubbing my eyes. “David?” I called as I stepped out of my cubicle.
“Damn, your eyes are pretty bloodshot,” he said, stretching his arms out in front of him.
“Really?” I said, closing my eyelids tight as if it were helping any. David let out a big yawn and began walking toward where our rooms were. “Hey, did that kinda.. fly by for you too?” I asked.
“Not really. If anything, it felt like it was dragging on forever.” I nodded my head with no response, scared to make things more uncomfortable than they already were. When we got to our rooms, we parted ways and I quickly crashed into bed. It wasn’t long before my neck began to feel a bit stiff, and while adjusting my pillow, opened my eyes to glimpse a clock on the wall that read 7:45 PM.
“Nooo,” I grumbled, feeling completely restless.
“Mr. Brannigan.” A muffled english accent came from just outside of my door. “We’ll be performing your weekly psych assessment before the start of your shift this evening. When you’re dressed, please, meet in my office just down the hall.”
“Okay,” I responded meekly.
Around the corner from our bunk hall was a door that said “Dr. Alan Pikumpsy,” on the nameplate.
“Come in,” the voice called from inside before I could even knock. I pushed open the door and entered the office; a small space that had been organized neatly but with only a small, cheap looking chair for visitors to sit in. “Please,” he began, gesturing toward the piece of plastic, “make yourself comfortable.”
“Okay.” I turned the chair slightly toward myself and took a seat. The Doctor was smiling and gave me a once over before writing a few notes on a pad of paper in front of him. His hairline was receding and the thin glasses that sat on his nose were specced with dandruff.
“As you know, we’re scheduled to have a sit down every week. During our talks, I’ll be testing your cognitive and emotional stability. Our work here is delicate, and I’m sure Dr. Lahee informed you of the importance of accuracy in the documenting process, correct?”
“Yes,” I responded.
“Very good,” the doctor said, nodding his head fervently. “You can trust me, Mr. Brannigan. Confide in me and I promise your time here will be fruitful.”
“Well,” I began with hesitation, unsure exactly what he wanted from me. “I struggled to sleep last night.”
“Very good, what else?” he asked, aggressively encouraging me to share more.
“That first shift was difficult, and it went by weirdly fast.”
“That’s normal!” The doctor said with an optimistic smile. “New jobs are unfamiliar, and this work can be repetitious. Those two factors combined can be a jarring cocktail!” I nodded my head, considering the truth of what he was saying - even if his temperament seemed… off.
Later on, my second shift had begun and I was already initialising my next document.
“Patient, John-47 Beta, Delta,” the voice of a female researcher said, sounding oddly fearful. “He… the patient has exhibited signs of remote activity. Weak… but it's there.” There was a moment after she began speaking where she paused, presumably reflecting on a possible decision. “It’s not like we thought it would be,” she whispered. “It appears to have altered the patient's memory. The only thing keeping him alive is the imperfect bond. At least, for now.” I stopped typing as the woman began listing off measurements, and a cold sweat formed on my forehead. The odd location of the facility began to make sense, even if the study itself was becoming more ambiguous. Something odd was going on deeper in the facility and the government was hiding it from the public. Scary or not, I had signed up for this position knowing full well I could be exposed to government secrets. Or, at least, that's how I had justified continuing on.
That night, when I finally collapsed into bed again, something happened to me that I hadn’t experienced in almost five full years. I had a dream. I was standing in a room with bare walls and plush, beige carpet beneath my feet. The room was so silent that I could hear the fibers of the carpet as they crunched beneath my foot. I suddenly found myself being guided forward by some mysterious force, preempting me as if it were a manifestation of my own intentions. Upon exiting the vacant space, a maze of winding corridors, illuminated by a blinding fluorescence, stretched out before me. The journey forward began and I found myself stumbling, as if I had just learned to use my legs. Unworried by the sudden loss of motor skills, I continued to rely on the unseen entity. In that unfamiliar space, the invisible presence was the only reliable sense I possessed. The trek continued for what felt like hours. Every square foot of that place was identical to the rest, completely eradicating any sense of progression. It wasn’t until I finally witnessed a door that I knew my journey had been successful. I heaved my stiff arm up, and rested my palm on the handle. With my musculature severely weakened, it took everything in me to push it down and pull it open.
Entering the room, I was now in the presence of a mysterious light; not blinding, but powerful enough to obscure whatever form was hidden away inside. The glow greeted me in a language non-verbal as the light slowly expanded to fill the entire room. A tingling sensation spread throughout my limbs and I opened my eyes, returning once more to the waking world.
Several days passed by where I went through the motions, for lack of a better term. David and I barely spoke as I opted to focus on my work, and get as much rest as possible. On several occasions, however, I found myself wandering away from my desk without any recollection of getting up from my seat. It seemed that every time I felt in control again, I was proven wrong.
“How have you been, Mr. Brannigan?” Dr. Pikumpsy was at ease, reclined in his chair with his notes placed in his lap.
“I’m ok,” I responded unconvincingly. The doctor looked up at me with a sudden spark of interest.
“And how is that?” he asked, now leaning forward. I fidgeted uncomfortably in my seat, as if my chair was also telling me to give it up.
“I guess things have been… weird.”
“I see. Tell me more.”
“Some of the recordings… It doesn’t make sense, what the researchers are talking about.”
“Of course it doesn’t!” the doctor assured me, “it’s all scientific jargon; measurements and equations, who could keep up with all of it?”
“They aren’t all science jargon…” I admitted. The doctor suddenly became very serious.
“What… have you heard?” he asked, the pitch of his voice sounding much lower than usual.
“I’m not really sure,” I began, “it didn’t make sense, like I said. A woman just mentioned a ‘bond’ keeping a patient alive, and that something had altered their memory?” The doctor stared at me blankly for a few seconds, his generally pleasant expression fading slowly from his face.
“You remember the conditions of your employment here, correct?” he asked plainly.
“..I do,” I answered.
“You’ve done well in sharing this information with me. You’ll do better to forget what you’ve heard entirely. I will not repeat myself.” I couldn’t speak, paralyzed by the doctors shocking change in demeanor. He took a moment to scribble down a few more notes before returning to his usual, eerily pleasant, state. “Time’s up, I’ll be seeing you next week,” he said with a smile.
I closed the doctor’s door behind me and started for my room. My mind began to dwell on the serious nature of this job, and whether or not I was capable of withstanding the pressure. If the Psychiatrist of the facility was going to rapidly switch between oddly caring and authoritarian, who could I confide in about the black outs I’d been experiencing or even the lack of restful sleep? It began to feel inevitable that I would either be terminated from my position or wheeled out of the facility on a stretcher. That’s when it finally hit me that I wasn’t really alone in this. I’d somehow ignored the presence of the only person I worked with that would openly speak with me. The person who had been there with me since the beginning of everything.
“David?” I called, knocking lightly on his door.
“Come in,” he responded. His room was unsurprisingly an exact copy of mine, with concrete flooring and a toilet in the far corner of the room, blocked only by a small partition facing the door. David turned to face me as I entered and smiled. “How are you?” he asked.
“Not great,” I answered with a sigh. “Did… you do something different with your hair?” I asked, noticing his dark brown curls.
“No, it’s always been like this,” he responded. “Are you not feeling well?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Lately, I’ve been unable to get any sleep. Even if I’m in bed for a full eight hours, it’s like my brain is staying on and I don’t know it.”
“That’s weird,” he said.
“There’s also been these moments when I’m awake, like one second I’m doing something and the next I’m somewhere completely different. Gaps of lost time, I guess.”
“That sounds scary,” he responded, sounding empathetic. I felt awkward, confiding in him things he probably didn’t entirely understand. And then, I noticed his luggage.
“Hey, do we have the same bag?” I asked. Without much of a reaction, David leaned over to glance at the bag and shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Yea, we have the same bag,” I told him, kneeling down next to his bed and looking at the tag. “Avalanche, same company,” I pointed out.
“Huh, weird,” he grunted.
“Actually, your shirt looks like one of mine too…” My voice began trailing off as a headache surged through my brain.
“Calm down,” David said, trying to reassure me as I dropped to my knees. “I promise, I’ll do my best to take care of us.” My vision blurred as the pain in my head seared throughout my skull.
“What’s happening?” I pleaded with tension in my voice. David stood over me, looking more and more like my own reflection.
“Rest, Connor. We don’t have to pretend anymore.”
I’m not sure how much time passed after that. It was by far the longest black out I experienced during that time. When consciousness began slowly returning to me, it did so with the sound of alarms and panicked employees.
“Sedated-… suppressed remo-… tempor-ly raised waves per cyc-…” My vision returned, obscured by liquid that had pooled up between my eyelids. I attempted to raise my hand and wipe the tears away, but was stopped short by the hard metal of handcuffs that were restraining me to a gurney.
“He’s back,” a man’s voice spoke.
“The... intern, not the remote.” I recognized the odd speech immediately.
“He spoke with Pikumpsy before returning to his bunk. We aren’t sure how the connection was made, but it’s stronger than any we’ve recorded.” I was being wheeled through a long hallway in a section of the facility I’d never seen before. Upon reaching a large, vault-like door, Dr. Fahee entered a code into a nearby keypad and it began to hiss and creak as it slowly swung itself open. We made our way inside of a technologically advanced laboratory space, passing a series of thick, protective glass walls that revealed a surprisingly familiar sight. Fluorescent ceiling lights beamed down onto old but clean, beige colored carpet. The scene beyond the glass appeared to pan by slowly, revealing many different angles of nearly identical looking corridors.
“Place the patient… onto the slab,” Fahee instructed his team.
They moved me from the gurney onto a concrete slate, jutting out from the lab wall. I was prepped for study with some sort of disc that rested atop the crown of my head, and electrical stimulation pads that connected to various points of my anatomy. Wraps of steel unfolded from the slab, pinning me hopelessly to its cold surface.
“Run the program,” Lahee instructed. A surge of energy poured through my body like ice cold water. Something at the core of my being writhed violently, desperate for control of my limbs, but halted at every attempt by the searing pain the device was causing.
“It’s there,” one of the researchers pointed out.
“Incredible,” Lahee said. “His... wave patterns are naturally bondable.”
“Doctor, we’ve found the flicker,” another researcher manning a computer station chimed in.
“What’s our current... wpc?” Lahee asked.
“1,100 and steadily declining. The sedative’s waning effects are allowing the host's base rhythm to trickle back.”
“Let it. At 800… we plunge.” A bead of sweat found its way from my hairline, down to my eyebrow. Though most of what they said was lost on me, I felt myself filled with a sense of terror. The team gathered around the computer station, watching carefully as the man seated began counting down the odd measurement.
“985wpc… 930wpc… 905…” I strained my eyes, desperate to see whatever it was they were looking at. The charge of energy flowing through my body pulsed rapidly, making even the slightest movement feel impossible. “855… 820… 811!”
The light in the room suddenly became distorted, like a television with faulty wiring. Everything was silent as I found myself no longer restrained but entirely without position, like standing in a poorly designed video game. When I attempted to move, the scene around me warped into a blur of color and granular particulates. I floundered like that for a short while, dumbfounded and helpless in that place between places, until something reached out for me. The presence guided me through a fog of darkness and misplaced matter, finally ending within the walls of the infinite hallway. An image of powerful light was standing before me again, lowering its luminescent limb away from my hand.
“David?” I muttered, my voice weak.
“Hello, Connor,” his powerful voice echoed outward, the pitch fluctuating between both high and low. I looked around myself, taking in the eerie sight of those lifeless corridors.
“Was it you before?” I asked.
“It was,” he replied simply. “It seems that our bond has completed.”
“The entire time… was I alone?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” he answered. I nodded understandingly. “We’re going to leave now.”
“I’m ready,” I replied, holding my hand out again.
The steel wraps binding my wrists and ankles stretched and tore as I passed through them. The researchers in the room scrambled away, yelling as they desperately searched the room.
“Chloroform, now!” As the chaos mounted, I stared at my hands, mesmerized by the clear energy that was pouring from my skin. It flowed like water, tapering into the air but reverberating upward before dissipating entirely. I could only watch as Dr. Fahee reached for me, clutching a wet surgical cloth in one hand, before being thrown violently through the plated glass. The room was instantly silent, as if the seal to a powerful vacuum had been removed. The researchers watching on in panic, went limp, dropping like ragdolls to the floor. I stared at their lifeless bodies for a moment, shocked as they mindlessly began dragging themselves forward, struggling their way into the eternal labyrinth of corridors.
“We’ve finished,” David’s voice sounded from within me. I awkwardly trudged my way out of the lab, forcefully reopening the vault door and searching for the way out. Upon reaching the transcription room, I learned some fraction of the story I had played a part in while previously unconscious. Cubicles were tossed away and scorched with black char. Light fixtures flickered along the ceiling, and metal cabinets were crumpled like aluminum foil. “The elevator,” he continued to instruct me. At the entryway to the underground facility, I summoned the elevator platform and stepped onto it. The distant ceiling of the brick walled structure found its way closer and closer, until the floor ceased its movement.
“Finally,” I let out. We pushed open the door revealing a welcomed sight of sun and blue skies overhead. “We did it,” I gasped, dropping to my knees.
“At last,” the voice let out. “This was the only option.”
“I don’t understand,” I responded. I felt as a pressure around my heart and lungs began to intensify. The warmth inside of me built its way to the surface of my flesh before exiting my body like a flop sweat. When the pressure in my chest finally loosened, I gasped for air and dropped limply to the ground.
I woke up nearly ten hours later in Cayuga medical center. With no identification on my person, a couple who had been passing by the small brick structure took me in, assuming I was some dumb, drunk college kid who’d gotten very lost. When the physician I awoke to asked me how I fractured my spine, I knew I was in trouble. I lost control of everything below my waist at some point during that 24 hour period, and I don’t have any memory of how it happened. It’s my opinion that David, or rather, the being, held me together until it was ready to leave. My parent’s flew out to see me, during the time I was unable to travel. They were panicked and confused when they got the news, understandably so. I remember sitting in that bed, my father asleep at my side, when the news reported on a large sinkhole just outside of town. A sinkhole that appeared directly where I’d been found, leaving no sign of a facility of any kind.
In the early months of my return home, my family wasted no time. They wanted someone to be held responsible for my condition, and found the only lawyer who would agree to take the case against the government protected entity. Our case was thrown out quickly however, as within a contract I signed during the application process, was a line dictating liability in the case of injury or death. There was also a secrecy clause that I was violating by attempting to testify, but I wouldn’t be charged if we agreed to drop the case. So, we did.
I’m in my childhood bedroom now, typing up my story that I pray doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. I can’t live like this without at least having answers though; consequences be damned. So, if you have any understanding of the experience I’ve shared or can make sense of the bizarre phenomena, I’d love to hear from you. To the creature who shared my skin during that time, I hope that your new found freedom was worth the cost. This experience will live on in my mind forever, and my perception of our world has been irreparably altered.


MARIAH CAREY LOVES CHRISTMAS. She loves it with a fanatic’s strict adherence to the laws of Christmas joy. She loves it like no one has ever loved Christmas before. (Did you have an actual reindeer at your holiday festivities last year? Did you hang out with Santa? Didn’t think so.) Christmas is also a cornerstone of the Carey complex. Frank Sinatra might have made the holiday classically jolly, Sufjan Stevens might have made it indie whiny, and Ariana Grande might have made it horny, but no artist has come to define our commercially driven holiday fantasies more than Carey has with “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Since the song dropped on her 1994 holiday album, it’s made an estimated $60 million-plus in royalties. It’s stayed relevant, thanks to fans, of course; a cover on the 2003 Love Actually soundtrack; an album reissue; an annual “All I Want for Christmas Is You” holiday-concert series that sold out a show at Madison Square Garden last year; an animated film; an Amazon Music mini-doc about the undying meaning of the song; and streams on streams on streams. Last year, it finally hit No. 1 on “The Hot 100” chart, after a record-breaking (for its slowness) 25-year journey. Who cares how long it took? It’s her 19th No. 1 hit-putting her above Elvis and one away from tying the Beatles. Does it matter if you like the song? (Full disclosure: I don’t.) No! It is the omnipresent anthem of holiday happiness. And so this year, this exceptionally s**t year of 2020, Carey, who always wants everyone to have a good Christmas, really thinks everyone should have a good Christmas, and she’s got 15 executives assembled in a Zoom war room at 10 p.m. to make damn sure everyone does. They’ve been going for two hours now, plotting ways to bring the merry and bright, no matter what it takes.
“I will sing with a puppet if it’s incredible,” I hear her say with deadly seriousness, that raspy, built-for-a-torchy-ballad voice floating in from one of many nearby rooms in the house she’s renting for the summer. She goes on to suggest possible puppets, determined to sing only with the best one or none at all.
Carey tippy-toes across the marble floors, carrying the Zoom meeting with her as she hovers in the entryway behind me. She’s in her comfies-black leggings, a black off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and full makeup-but even dressed down, she’s walking like she’s in six-inch strappy Louboutins (a habit she references in the song “Crybaby”). She mutes her iPad mic to greet me quickly. “Hi! A.D.!” (Everyone in her immediate orbit is reduced to first and last initial. Stories sound like mathematical equations in which M.C. and M.R. meet J.D.) “I’m so sorry this is running late!” She’ll be with me soon, she says. She just has to find a diplomatic way to let these men know something they are suggesting is ugly! She goes back to the call. “It just isn’t giving me Christmas warmth,” she says, delivering her criticism as delicately as one of her famous vocal trills.
Carey is running 30-well, 45-okay, we’re going to be real with you: We don’t know how many-minutes late. This is what we expect of her, no? The Diva who bathes in milk and will only be photographed from the right side. We think of these indulgences as readily as her vertiginous notes, or those athletic vocal runs, or her belting “Juust. Liiike. Hoone-aaay,” while she holds her finger to her ear to keep pitch. So it’s hard to be mad at Carey for fully embodying all the various Mariahisms that define her.
Anything less would feel like short shrift, to be honest. Plus she’s a generous diva. She’s dispatched her five-person team, her covid-quarantine pod, to tend to me while I wait. They’d been together since March, without any outsiders, until I was permitted to come tonight (with mask on face and fresh negative covid-test results in hand). The excitement of a newcomer has everyone bustling around like a live-action reenactment of the “Be Our Guest” scene in Beauty and the Beast. “Allison, can I get you wine?” asks her longtime tour manager Michael, as he shows me to a couch and lingers to tell me, in his languid, Idris Elba-British accent, about the first time he met Mariah, decades ago, as she was glamorously coming off a Concorde. “Allison, it would be more comfortable if you sit in here-the lighting is better,” says Ellen, her longtime house manager. “Allison,” Kristofer, her Ken-doll-handsome makeup artist, calls out to me as I’m walking from one great couch to an upgraded one, “I’m making fresh shortbread. Would you like it with jam or powdered sugar?” Her ex-backup dancer and current boo, Bryan Tanaka, smiles at me, doing his part by just being charming. Ellen fluffs a pillow, pours a glass of wine and a glass of room-temperature water, and puts them down in front of the seat Carey will eventually occupy. I am left to sit in a luxurious beige-toned room that smells lightly of vanilla and gardenias- exactly like my rich childhood friend’s suburban home.
The house is still daytime bustling even though it’s now edging on 11:30 p.m., which, according to Mariah Carey Standard Time, is the middle of the day, not the end. Carey is a self-proclaimed vampyyyyra. She loves a sunset, loves a sunrise, and would prefer to exist exclusively in those shadowy hours in between. (She has a sun allergy, she insists.) Her time zone has other quirks: True Love only occurs in summer, underneath the stars. Winter is always joyous. Any day has the potential to be Christmas. And she is eternally 12 years old, as she has been saying since at least 2008, which explains the recurring themes of butterflies, Christmases, dol-phins-epic, song-worthy romantic fantasies. It’s in direct opposition to the other version of extreme femininity she likes to play with, that of the diva in heels on the stair-stepper. Neither persona fully explains how effortlessly she can command a platoon of professionals to execute her vision until you consider that this dualism may be her secret to career control. One cannot be dismissed if one demands what one needs operatically. One cannot be told what is or is not age-appropriate if one doesn’t acknowledge age.
Anyway, the whole 12 thing-it’s sort of a joke and it’s sort of not. Carey turned 50 in March, and Moroccan and Monroe-a.k.a. Roc and Roe, a.k.a. Dem-Kids-her 9-year-old twins with ex-husband Nick Cannon, presented her with a cake with an enormous 12 candle, complicit in her continued crusade against getting older. One milestone is colliding with another. This year marks both half a century of existence and her 30th year in this business-30 years since her first album, Mariah Carey, came out. In those three decades, she’s produced 15 studio albums, been nominated for 34 Grammys (and only won five-don’t get her started), and done everything a star can do (an HSN jewelry line, a Champagne brand, world tours, a reality show, a Vegas residency, an American Idol judging stint). This year, she’s been taking something of a victory lap with a celebration she’s calling MC30, opening the vaults on neverbefore-seen video footage and an album of unreleased songs and demos called The Rarities, and she’s finally put all that legendary shade to paper with a memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She’s still ignoring her age, but she’s at least letting herself acknowledge the passing of time.
She’s been teasing this memoir for more than a year, mentioning it at a “Genius Q&A” during the press tour for her last album, Caution, but thinking about it for ten. It’s 300-plus meaning-packed pages, and, yes, what she didn’t include has meaning too. Eminem, who was reportedly “stressed” over what Carey might say about their rumored 2001 fling, doesn’t have to worry. “There’s some songs that I can sing in response to that, but I will not do it,” she’ll say when I ask. And then, with a roll of her head: “If somebody or something didn’t pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren’t in the book.”
What’s in the book is “for the fans” (of course) but mostly for herself, or at least a version of herself. It’s her turn now to “emancipate that scared little girl,” she says. It’s why she spent two years telling stories to her co-writer, Michaela angela Davis, turning the famed Moroccan Room in her Tribeca penthouse into an emotional vomitorium, in hopes that finally, after a career of people misinterpreting her, she can make it all clear. In a way, though, the story she tells in the memoir is the story she’s been telling herself, her fans, her critics-everyone-over and over again for years. And after 30 years of telling these stories, in different ways, you have to wonder why she still feels so misunderstood.
HIT IT, TANAKA!” yells Roe, getting into position as Ellen and Kristofer pull open the French doors leading to the terrace overlooking the pool. Carey strolls out to where Roc and Roe are waiting to surprise her. The conference Zoom is over, but there’s one more thing to attend to before we can sit down.
Carey’s latest single, “Save the Day,” dropped just a few minutes ago, at midnight, and the twins want to celebrate. The opening violins of the song swell over the outdoor stereo system, and they launch into choreography they’ve spent all day perfecting. The song is a long-delayed collaboration with Ms. Lauryn Hill they conceived of in 2011. They decided to release it now, since its message about the importance of coming together to fix the world felt relevant with national Black Lives Matter protests and the lead-up to the election. “It’s very auspicious,” she says, musing that it would have been the perfect song to play during the Democratic National Convention.
Roe executes a string of cartwheels while Carey looks on, hands raised to her face in beatific surprise, and Tanaka captures the moment on two iPhone cameras on tripods with lighting rigged. Rocky hits every dance currently popular on TikTok.
Rocky loves TikTok, but Carey thinks he’s too young to be on it. Recently, she had to put him on a “time-out” after he made a video asking his mom to say hi to “his fan.” Carey can be heard off-camera saying, “I’m on a business call,” and Rocky turns back to the camera and says, “My mom is not ready to be shot on TikTok,” sticks his tongue out, and blows a raspberry in disappointment.
“Okay, I was really on a business call,” Carey says, mildly annoyed at the whole situation. People assumed she just declined because she wasn’t wearing makeup. Plus she wasn’t the one who set up the account for him. “Co-parenting,” she says, then sings, “‘Yeah, it ain’t easy, baby. It ain’t easy.’ But you know what? It’s important. We keep it good for them,” she says of Cannon, whom she divorced in 2014. She won’t comment on his recent career drama (he was fired from his longtime gig hosting Wild ‘N Out for making anti-Semitic remarks on his podcast, Cannon’s Class) but speaks fondly of him in her memoir in the chapter called “Dem Babies.”
The performance ends. Carey runs to them, arms wide open, tears in her eyes, cooing over how lovely everything is-the dance, the sunflowers, the sign. She brings them in for a hug and photo op, but before the shutter can snap, Roe moves away too fast, ensnaring Carey’s large diamond butterfly ring in her hair. “Roe, wait, I’m tangled,” she screams, while Rocky emits a loud belch and giggles.
Carey says good night to the twins. It’s an atmospherically nice night, and she decides she wants to go outside to talk. “It’s better, right?” she says as we sit down at a long wooden table next to the violin-shaped pool (a Stradivarius, with a six-foot koi pond as the bow). Her people are again bustling, setting up the table for us, slipping out of the shadows, putting down drinks and candles, moving the whole setup outside.
“Ellen, will you make us some ‘horse devoirs,’” Carey asks, intentionally mispronouncing the word. “That’s what we call ’em.” “Are you cold, Mariah?” asks Kristofer, who exits to grab her a little throw. “Are you guys warm enough?” asks Ellen, who enters to put down snacks. More candles are placed around us. “Oh, darling. Don’t put that down there for me, because that is hideous,” exclaims Carey. “That is underlighting!” The candle is whisked away. Carey asks Ellen if she wouldn’t mind taking Chacha, her emotional-support dog, to her bedroom, so that she’s there waiting when Mariah finally slips off to sleep sometime after the sun comes up.
Finally, wine poured, throw draped, candles arranged to ensure we both look cinematically beautiful, horse devoirs on the way, she settles back and gazes out over the property, watching the fiber-optic pool lights dance through the rainbow and back again. She’s a little tired, she apologizes, and already a little emotional.
“Can you believe I’m back here?” she says, sighing. “Here” is an upstate rich-person’s enclave not far from where Martha Stewart is thirst-trapping with her chickens. Carey hasn’t spent time in this town since what she refers to as “the Sing Sing days”-when, in the mid-1990s, she shared an over $20 million compound with her toxic first husband, the former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola. Mottola discovered and signed Carey when she was 19. They married in 1993, when she was 23 and he was 43. Carey has repeatedly described the marriage as controlling. She felt like “a prisoner.”
Mottola and Carey split in 1996, but she still gets that clenched feeling in her gut whenever she talks about him. With a wave of her hand: “I say it all in the book. I’d rather people read it that way.” She takes a long sip from a big goblet of red wine. “And by the way, I forgot a lot of that stuff when I was writing the book. And then recently, people that were friends of his from childhood were like, ‘I hope she told the real story.’”
It’s not a new story in its particulars-it’s been alluded to in tabloids and interviews for decades by both Carey and Mottola. Even its emotional contours were out there already, in her own words, mostly in song lyrics. She’s made a habit of putting her stories-her past lovers, secret enemies, petty grievances, and big traumas-in her songs since she started writing them at 13. (And she does, may she remind us, write her own songs. That’s another thing she’s spent a lifetime reminding everyone-see the two-minute supercut of her saying “As a songwriter”-though she was only just inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, a decade after she became eligible.)
“Honestly, if you look at the words to ‘I Wish You Well,’ it tells you a lot of things about different people in my life. It starts with ‘This goes out to you and you and you/Know who you are,’” she breaks into a half-sing. “And there’s a lot of different people referenced in that from my point of view as a songwriter.”
“And then, background vocals,” she says, indicating when the singers would have kicked in with the phrase “Can’t believe I still need to protect myself from you.” “And then back to the main verse: ‘But you can’t manipulate me like before.’” She’s speaking, but rhythmically; her fingers are waggling up and down near her ear like they do when she sings. She pauses. “It’s like I’ve been telling this story if someone cared to look deep enough. I just feel like there’s no way anybody could have known the complexities and the layered situation that is my life.”
Though her fans, her Lambily, as they call themselves (a combination of family and Lamb, as Carey sometimes refers to her loved ones), have usually paid close enough attention to know the significance of the songs that mean the most to Mariah. Even if she may have never come out and confirmed which lyric is about which incident or relationship, they have their theories. While my friend who is a Lamb Supreme has always suspected it, I, a solid Mariah fan who can sing at least ten of her songs without missing a word, was surprised to learn from the book that “My All” was not just about the general thrall of a new love so exciting you’d do anything to bone but about Carey and her brief fling with Derek Jeter.
The knowledge that this stuff is “already out there” made it easier for Carey to write the memoir. It removed the burden of dropping bombshells (though there are some) and instead lets her just confirm, contextualize, and detail things from her POV-like how she and Jeter met at a dinner party and started text-flirting, secretly, while she was at the end of her marriage to Mottola. Knowing that fans already suspected the song “The Roof” was about her first meeting with him made it easier for her to reveal what she wore the night they had a clandestine kiss on the roof (get it?) of his apartment building. There was Moët. She wore a buttery leather Chanel skirt. She remembers her boots and the rain and her hair curling in stunning detail.
“Of course I do! I can never forget that moment,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like it was some intensely deep, intellectually stimulating-again, it was a great moment, and it happened in a divine way because it helped me get past living there, in Sing Sing, under those rules and regulations.” When she belts, “I’d risk my life to feeeeyall / Your body next to mine,” in “My All,” it’s because she really was risking her life to have a night with Jeter in Puerto Rico, she says.
Her anxiety around Mottola sits just under the surface. She writes candidly about the security cameras she says were always watching her and the security team she felt was reporting her every move. “He was like this oppressive humidity,” she says. She could never escape. She could never talk about it, even if she was, in her own way, always talking about it. When she first discussed Mottola during a Zoom call we had the week before, she started to cry: “It ignites the triangle in my stomach.”
In his own memoir, Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, from 2013, Mottola denied being restrictive or controlling but deemed their involvement “wrong and inappropriate,” by way of apology, and takes credit for his part in her early success. Carey suspects he tried to sabotage her career after they divorced. More than suspects, she says, referencing a 2017 interview on Desus & Mero in which Murder Inc. co-founder Irv Gotti confirmed Mottola boosted a J.Lo and Ja Rule duet to mess with Carey. “It’s out there,” she says. She also knows he might be angered by her perspective, though she hopes he’s not. “I could have gone harder,” she says, suggesting she could have painted him as a monster. “And I didn’t. I give him credit where credit is due.”
So picking this same upstate enclave for her self-quarantine palace does seem inconceivable, but the kids needed space. “Not that the apartment wasn’t spacious,” she explains. (We know; we all saw it on Cribs in 2002.) Providing this for her children is just one way she ensures that they have a better life than she did. “They’re not running around with matted locks,” she says when asked how her own childhood has shaped how she parents. “They know that I’m here for them. They know that if they want to talk with their father, he’s a phone call away,” she goes on. “They have stability. That’s what I didn’t have. They will never have a holiday that’s not happy unless something I can’t do anything about happens. They understand that they are Black. They have a whole lot of self-esteem and self-worth that I never had. And I probably still don’t now. I know that I still don’t.”
She sighs deeply. She’s been up all day-like actual day. So tonight, with the wine and the eerily quiet country night, her 1 a.m. feels like everyone else’s: a time when the existential takes hold and won’t let go.
“But maybe one day I’ll feel equal to the rest of the human race. I didn’t even think I was worthy of happiness and success. I thought I wasn’t allowed to be that person that would have that.” She gestures again to the pool, the property, the basketball courts, the baseball diamond (“not a big one”). “Like, sitting here, looking at this? And after describing the shack?”
The shack is what she calls her childhood home on Long Island, a run-down house at the end of a nice block that she’s still embarrassed by. It’s easy to assume that her dogged adherence to the age of 12 stems from its being a simpler time, that there is something happy to relive there, but that’s not quite right. “I always say, ‘I’m only 12, yay!’ But when you see how many times I talk about ‘I was 12, and this happened,’ it’s clear I went through a lot of stuff as a kid.”
Carey grew up, as she tells it, poor, mixed race, in an all-white neighborhood that made her feel her mixed race-ness, where she was not white enough “but not Black enough to scare people into not saying stuff around me.” Her father, Alfred Roy, was a Black engineer from Harlem, and her mother, Patricia, an Irish American opera singer from Illinois who was disowned by her family for having his children, separated before she was 3. She lived with her mother and only saw her father on the weekends she’d go to visit him and eat his special linguine e vongole. One of the good memories. She never felt like her home situation was stable. She was always aware of tension between her parents and between her parents and her siblings. School wasn’t much better. In the book, she catalogues the racial slights she suffered at the hands of white children.
She writes about her childhood as the thing she had to overcome to become Mariah Carey. And because our traumas are like pothos plants, easily propagated from the clippings of the original, her parents’ trauma (her father’s of existing as a Black man in America; her mother’s of familial rejection for marrying a Black man and a career that didn’t come to fruition) became hers to overcome as well. As did the difficult upbringings of her older brother, Morgan, and her older sister, Alison, whom she now refers to as her “ex-brother” and “ex-sister.” Carey writes about witnessing Morgan’s volatility and fights with her mother. She discusses how she longed to have a real big-sisterly relationship with Alison but instead ended up in dangerous situations, sometimes with men, whenever she got too close. (Her nickname for me, A.D.-she asked to call me that, she told me, because she’s so estranged from her sister she doesn’t like to say Allison.)
“Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did,” she writes. She hasn’t spoken to Alison since 1994, though she maintains a relationship with the son Alison had at 15. Mostly, Carey constantly worries that they’ll go to the tabloids again, as she says they have done in the past. She doesn’t want them to see her as an “ATM machine with a wig,” she says. (Recently, Alison has made headlines for accusing their mother in a court filing of forcing her into sexual acts and satanic rituals as a child.)
“Here’s the thing: They have been ruthlessly just heartless in terms of dealing with me as a human being for most of my life. I never would have spoken about my family at all had they not done it first.” Even still, you have to wonder how Alison will feel if she picks up the memoir of her estranged superstar sibling and reads how her sister learned a hard lesson about what self-worth should be during the baby shower for her teen pregnancy.
I ask Carey if there is any chance of reconciliation with her ex-siblings in the future. “I have forgiveness in my heart,” she says, “and so I forgive them, but I am not trying to invite anybody to come hang out over here. I think they’re very broken, and I feel sad for them.”
Though she writes as candidly about her mother as she does about her siblings-their confrontations and competitions-she finds it harder to separate herself from the woman who discovered she could sing. (When Carey was barely 3, she sang along with her mother while she was rehearsing a song from Verdi’s Rigoletto, so the legend starts.) Carey still takes care of her, financially, “and always will.” She is one of the book’s dedicatees. “I tried to make her feel like I really do think she did the best she could,” she says and picks up her glass to cheers me.
“I cried writing a lot of parts of this book. Maybe it’s because I have such vivid recollections. You know what? I’m sure I’m going to have to deal with a lot of people being upset with me. I hope not.”
OF ALL THE KNOTS she’s eternally trying to unravel, there is one that, she feels, has refused to come loose easily: “I really have been like, ‘I’m mixed. I’m mixed. I’m really, really mixed,’” Carey sings at me, turning her lifelong repetition into a little ditty. “Like, whatever. Not to make a song out of it. That’s what we do.” This, according to Carey, is her most famous refrain, the one where she explains that she is biracial over and over again.
She already, actually, did make a song of it: “Outside,” from 1997’s Butterfly. She quotes it often in life and in the book (and will sing it on the Audible recording). And now she sings the lyrics to me: “Standing alone/Eager to just believe it’s good enough to be what/You really are/But in your heart/Uncertainty forever lies/And you’ll always be/Somewhere on the/Outside.”
When she cites feelings of alienation or shame, it’s often at the hands of white people. She writes about an incident where she was invited over to a friend’s house in the Hamptons, only to arrive and be called the N-word. It’s the Black women in her life who held her up when nobody else did. Her Nana Reese (her great-aunt on her father’s side) provided some stability. Her “aunties” were the ones who tried to help her learn how to do her hair. Da Brat once helped her escape Sing Sing to go get fries from Burger King. She dedicated a whole chapter to her Cousin LaVinia (“Vinny”), who was one of her closest friends. LaVinia recently died, but it’s her estimation of Carey’s struggles that most shaped her understanding of her mixed-race identity. “It’s like Vinny always said: ‘You kids had all the burdens of being Black but none of the benefits.’”
Before Davis and Carey turned in a draft of The Meaning of Mariah, Davis sent an email to her editor. “I was like, I have to put this on record that all the conversation around race and particularly the view of white people is all Mariah,” Davis says over the phone. They had a nickname for her when she got in this mode: “Militant Riah.” “There were a couple of times that she was like, ‘You’re being too careful. They hated me. I would never be good enough for some white people.’”
And yet, when she first debuted as an artist, a number of reviews misidentified her heritage. In 1990, a Los Angeles Times writer called her a “white singer who has a black vocal style.” Nelson George, a Black critic writing for Playboy, called her “a white girl who can sing,” while another accused her of being marketed as a “white Whitney Houston.” Carey says she can’t speak to the intentionality behind her marketing at the time-“I was 19, what did I know?” In her book, she references how her label sometimes “scrubbed” her music of its “urban inflections.” She recalls recording the “Fantasy” remix with ODB in 1995 and playing it for Mot-tola. “The fk is that?” he said. “I can do that. Get the fk outta here with that.”
Carey would eventually cease to be considered solely pop, becoming more of a crossover pop-hip-hop-R&B fixture. Even still, she’s spent a significant portion of her post-Mottola era defending her biracial identity. After Carey released the hip-hopheavy album Butterfly, comedian Sandra Bernhard made a series of racist jokes during her stand-up special about the way Carey was “acting [N-word-ish] … with Puff Daddy,” suggesting that the white-perceived Carey was all of a sudden acting “Black.” At the time, Carey commented, “If I was two shades darker, there’d have been people protesting for me.” (She ended up writing the NAACP, and the special was taken off the air.) The commentary didn’t stop in the 2000s. Even as recently as 2008, her race was being written about weirdly, e.g., when Jody Rosen sniped about her “racial ambiguity [being] mildly interesting” while trying to determine if she was a captivating pop star or just a good singer. (He decided on the latter.) But “Vision of Love,” she reminds me, went to No. 1 on the R&B charts first. And she performed it live for the first time on The Arsenio Hall Show. “Someone knew they were introducing me as a Black girl.”
In the 1990s, being a “white artist” or a “Black artist” often created deeply divergent music careers. White meant pop, Black meant hiphop or R&B, and within those silos, there were separate charts, audiences, magazine covers, award recognition, and dress codes, and to seek one audience meant potentially alienating the other. As Carey was building her career, there was very little room for crossover, and there wasn’t a lot of understanding afforded to those who didn’t really fit in the boxes. If you were acceptable to white audiences as a pop star, as Houston was, you ran the risk of alienating Black audiences and vice versa. It’s what Lena Horne called being the “kind of Black that white people could accept”: Carey, because of her light skin, and Houston, because of the way she spoke (softly, like a newscaster). The 2017 Whitney Houston documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me, revisits the moment in 1989 when Houston performed at the Soul Train Awards and the crowd booed and called her “Whitey.” It’s only recently that we’ve begun to more fully acknowledge how damaging and destabilizing the label of “not Black enough” can be.
Davis and Carey met in 2005 at an early-listening event for The Emancipation of Mimi, one of Carey’s comeback albums. Four years earlier, Carey had suffered her first major flop with the movie Glitter. She’d been dropped by EMI a year after it signed her to one of those historic colossally big deals (reportedly, $100 million for five albums). She had a public breakdown and was hospitalized for exhaustion after she made an erratic appearance on TRL. (In the memoir, she reminds us that, despite all that, the song “Loverboy” from Glitter ended up being the best-selling single of 2001. “I’m real,” she mic-drops.)
The Emancipation of Mimi was a reassertion of Carey as an artist, her opportunity to set the tone for the next phase of her career, one she wanted to be centered around her Blackness, and she wanted to do that with a cover story for Essence. “It was very strategic that she started with Black women,” Davis says. At the time, Davis was an editor at the magazine. “Black women have always grounded her in truth,” she says.
Essence had never had Carey on the cover before. Previous editors-in-chief had passed “because, they literally said, ‘Mariah Carey has never said she was Black,’” recounts Davis. The writer, Joan Morgan, brought in evidence: stacks of clippings and transcripts where Carey said “I’m Black” or “My father is Black.” In the end, Davis won. They ran an article in which Carey discussed, similarly to now, what people didn’t know about her struggles with her racial identity. At the end, the article declared her “a grown ass Black woman.” The cover line read: “America’s Most Misunderstood Black Woman.” That was 15 years ago.
From a musical perspective, at least, many of the issues Carey faced early in her career feel less intense now. Hip-hop culture is pop culture. And thanks to Mariah Carey’s 1997 album Butterfly, the once-novel idea of a pop-hip-hop crossover-what her friend and collaborator Jermaine Dupri calls hip-pop-is essentially just what a new song by any artist sounds like.
It’s worth considering whether she would have been as big of a pop star if she had originally been marketed as a Black artist. Would she have been able to collaborate with ODB and the long roster of hiphop artists and producers she favored, and to see those songs become megahits, if her proximity to whiteness hadn’t made it all seem “non-threatening” to white audiences?
“The truth is I will never say I had the same experience as a darker-skinned woman,” Carey starts in. She acknowledges the privilege in her being accepted by white audiences and a white-run music industry, but to her, it also means “having a white mother, and being forced to live in white neighborhoods, and feeling ashamed that there is nobody visibly Black there … and I’m being so real right now that I want to edit myself,” she pauses.
“Believe you me, I’m not thrilled to be this skin tone all the time.” Then she launches into the questions she has asked herself her whole life and maybe continues to ask: “How was I supposed to fit in? I was, like, the only one that’s this weird mutant, mutt-using an antiquated phrase that I’m not asking anyone else to ever use again, but I’m embracing it- mulatto girl. I’m not even embracing it. It’s a horrible way of defining somebody. It actually means ‘mule.’”
Whatever it did for her career, she says, it also “distanced me from the comfort of support and protection from some Black people. Which is an even deeper kind of a pain, pile of pain, if that makes sense. It’s been a lot.”
IF THERE’S ONE THING that makes I Carey nervous about the release of this book into the world, besides some content that is going to “surprise even her best friends,” it’s that people will misconstrue why she’s talking about a lot of this stuff now. She has wanted to write the memoir for a decade, she says. “Whether or not it suddenly became okay to deal with stuff, this book was coming out anyway.” She doesn’t want to seem like she’s capitalizing on the moment.
But the current moment does seem to keep giving new context for her experiences. For example, the conversation surrounding Ellen DeGeneres’s reportedly toxic workplace behavior led to a clip of an interview with Carey resurfacing on Twitter. It’s from 2008, when there were rumors Carey was pregnant. DeGeneres, apparently determined to get Carey to confirm the speculation, challenged her to drink Champagne. Carey was forced to announce her pregnancy. She miscarried soon after. “I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say. And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage. I don’t want to throw anyone that’s already being thrown under any proverbial bus, but I didn’t enjoy that moment.” Carey goes on to say that there is “an empathy that can be applied to those moments that I would have liked to have been implemented. But what am I supposed to do? It’s like, [sings] ‘What are you going to do?’”
Her fans have also helped her reexamine her past. In 2018, a Lamb-led campaign, #JusticeForGlitter, turned her former career low into a cult classic and earned the soundtrack a place on the charts for a little while. The movie did come out the week after 9/11; it never truly got a fair shake. With the help of her Lambs, and a Change.org petition demanding that streaming services finally offer it, the album reached No. 1 on iTunes. That same year, Carey was on the cover of People, revealing her battle with bipolar disorder for the first time. It seemed to explain what happened during Glitter, when she went on TRL, but she chose not to elaborate further in the book. “Because I don’t feel like there’s a mental-illness discussion to be had,” she says when I ask. “It is not to deny that. I am not denying that. I just don’t know that I believe in any one diagnosis for a situation or a human being.”
For her, the real story of Glitter, which she tells in great detail for the first time, was the story of her working too hard, of succumbing to the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and of her family betraying her. (Her mother called the police on her when she was acting erratically, and her brother was the one to check her into a recovery facility, she writes.) That’s perhaps the biggest benefit of this memoir to her: “Now, if people have questions, I can be like, ‘Please refer to chapter x,’ rather than me having to stick up for myself, protect myself, defend myself. Because we can all be wounded, but are we going to sit around licking our wounds forever?”
IT’S NEARING 4 A.M., and she could I talk more, but she desperately needs to use “the loo.” She slips away while her team comes out, partly to keep me company and partly to signal it’s time for me to wrap it up.
The first time we talked, Carey mentioned that it was a bit lonely realizing that she was the only one of her peers who lived to write her own story. Whitney’s gone. Prince is gone. There’s some pressure that comes with that: What story are you willing to tell about yourself, and what are you willing to accept? Carey has finally shaped her story the way she sees it: one of herself as a perpetual underdog who has risen, fallen, and climbed back as dexterously as her famed melismas. It’s the narrative that has propulsed her to greatness; it’s also her mental loop.
Carey comes back from the bathroom and, it turns out, a costume change. She’s swapped her peasant blouse for a black satin kimono robe. It’s humid, her hair has fallen flat, and her laugh is mingling with the chirping cicadas that have emerged. Sunrise is closer than sunset, and it’s starting to feel loose, like the last hour at the club, right before the lights come up, as the DJ tries to find the perfect song to send you off.
Tanaka slips his hand into hers and murmurs that the pasta aglio e olio he has made her is ready. Her emotional-support dog is waiting in bed for her. Her two kids are upstairs, happy but maybe only pretending to be asleep.
Despite how legends want to be seen, this is probably how we most want to see them. As living proof that a life of ups and downs and hard work and too much work ends with you rich as f**k, sitting next to a violin-shaped pool with the family you’ve created to supplant the one you had to endure.
Michael is recounting a story of the time a group of Bloods came up to Mariah backstage at the Source Awards and he was worried. “Oh, I’m good at diffusing tense situations because of my childhood,” she says. Everyone was scared, but they just wanted to take pictures with her on their disposable camera, no big deal. Despite urging me to leave, he pulls up a chair, and they start swapping memories.
“Oh, remember,” Carey says, lurching into another tale, “Jay [as in Z] has that great story of when we were all there together at the club and Prince was taking so long to perform? Whatever, it’s a long story, but he didn’t go on until like 5 a.m. with Chaka Khan, who was having Hennessy and smoking and still singing like a trumpet, and it was amazing. It was amazing.”
Not everyone was there, but everyone agrees it was amazing.
“By the way, this should have been in the book,” she says.
Yes, everyone agrees, it should have been in the book. There was a lot that could have been in the book.
“There’s so much more dragging that could have been done,” she says. “I really didn’t say everything,” she adds with a smile, leaving us hoping, again, for another piece of the story.
Source: Hejira (UK mix)

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This is a living post and will be updated daily with additional info and FAQs throughout the week before being archived in this collection.
If you cannot find your answer here, try checking an archived Weekly MegaFAQ in the sidebar or asking in the daily Basic Questions Megathread.

WEEKLY MEGAFAQ: JUNE 15th - JUNE 21st 2020

Last updated: June 16th @ 05:12 UTC

PATCH UPDATE LINKS

• Patch Update Notes: June 16th 2020
• Weekly Event Schedule: June 16th - June 23rd 2020
• New Hero Overview: SSR [Mastermind] Mage Blue Lillia on Global
• Final Boss Gowther Event
• Growth Support Check-in Event
• Prelude to Turmoil Growth Event

EVENTS

• JP Anniversary Gift code is HAPPY1YEAR
• Global Anniversary Gift code is 7DS100
• MegaFAQ: 100-Day Celebration Event
• Final Boss Gowther event is starting on June 16th
• The current salvage event ends June 23rd
• The "Rules of the Deadly Sins II" Battle Event is not advisable for gold farming
• You can sell Eve of 100-Day Draw Tickets for 100,000 Gold each

DRAWS/COIN SHOP

• Blue Lilia is being released June 16th via a Step Up banner
• SSR “Infinity” Great Mage Merlin has been added to the Race Draw Ⅰ pool
• Red Gowther; Green Merlin; and Blue Skinny King are considered essential buys from the Platinum Coin Shop
• Red Gowther should be your priority out of the three
• Red Arthur; Red Howzer; and Green Jericho are considered essential buys from the Gold Coin Shop
• None of the above mentioned characters will leave the Coin Shop and are permanent fixtures
• Merlin and Escanor are not unlockable via the story; only via draws (and Coin Shop for Merlin)
• General consensus on buying Red Demon Meliodas is only if you struggle to beat Crimson Demon, as that is the characters main use; or want cosmetics for BDM
• Coin Shop discounts are rotated weekly but nobody knows who will be featured. There used to be a schedule but it's no longer in use
• It's safe to pull on all tickets; except SSR Part 1 which G Diane will be added to if you want her
• The Equipment Draw is really only a worthwhile investment if you need anvils to roll SSR gear, and if you have the spare gold
• SR and SSR pendants are the main thing you should buy from the Knighthood shop
• You should never really spend diamonds on a basic draw banner; hold onto them for specific event ones
• You can "convert" silver coins to gold; and gold to platinum by buying duplicates from the Coin Shop

TEAM BUILDS/CHARACTERS

• Wondering which characters to focus on? Check out the tier list and teams list to get some ideas
• A Complete Guide to Associations
• Affinity Food Farming Spreadsheet
• Focus less on your overall account CC and more on building up the characters of teams you will use for main; PVP; farming; and Death Matches
• You increase your CC by levelling; awakening; gear; upgrading ult; cosmetics; and upgrading associates
• "*/6" on a character refers to what level their ultimate is at e.g 6/6 is max level
• In order for friends to use one of your characters, they must be in your first Team Set

LEVELING/AWAKENINGS

• Total materials needed for leveling can be found here
• Total materials needed for Awakenings can be found here
• Total materials needed for Limit Breaks from LV 60 to 75 can be found here
• The mats needed for LV 80 are 3 SSR Pendants/10 SR Pendants/30 R Pendants; 30 Grey Demon Mats; and 30 Crimson Demon mats
• You can get SSR and SR Pendants from Fort Solgres Enhance Dungeon; Knighthood Shop; and the Coin Shop (this is the least recommended method)
• When Awakening, all the 7DS characters & Elizabeth require Water of Life; everyone else uses Demon's Blood
• You shouldn't need to level your farming characters above LV 60
• Ideally you shouldn't convert XP potions to higher levels as you lose out on some XP value in favour of saving on gold cost

FARMING

• Fort Solgres Enhance Dungeon is your best option for farming XP and pendants
• Fort Solgres Evolve Dungeon during Stamina Decrease Events are your best option for getting gold by "book farming"
• Boss Battle stages during Stamina Decrease Events are your best bet at farming for chalices and SSR runes
• The repeatable gear quests during Free Stage Stamina Decrease Events are your best option for farming for SSR gear
• The best difficulty to farm materials and food is Easy as the drop rate increase is minimal in comparison to stamina cost
• Some Awakening materials can only be farmed on Hard or above, so double check the drops before you start
• For overnight farming, you need to leave the game open on your phone; and it's recommended to turn down the game graphics and speed settings
• If you're overnight farming when the daily reset happens, the game will kick you out of the autofarm
• When you run out of stamina potions when auto-farming, the game will just stop farming
• The best way to get stamina potions are silver coins (1); friendship coins (400); and the daily cooking quest (2). Also look out for events and quests that offer them as one-time rewards
• I recommend keeping hold of any 5* books or upgrading them to 6* when/if you need them/the space as they are the hardest to get
• Sell any excess books you have directly from your inventory; they cannot be sold to merchants and aren't affected by Veronica's buff

COSMETICS

• "What is the best cosmetic for this character?" Check out the character profile here to compare all their cosmetic stats
• My personal checklist on "should I buy this cosmetic?"
• You need to own at least one version of a character in order to buy their cosmetics
• You can register up to five cosmetic items of each type (weapon, outfit, headpiece) for each character by clicking the green hanger on the item in their closet. Your character will benefit from the stats of all of the registered items
• The Most Malevolent Knighthood Costume Set II is on sale from June 9th to June 22nd
• The set contains cosmetics for Diane; Ban; King; and Gowther
• The items will be available for purchase as individual pieces from the Sacred Shop on June 23rd until July 6th for 30 diamonds per piece
• The Knighthood cosmetics will be available as individual pieces from the Sacred Shop on June 9th until June 22nd for 30 diamonds per piece
• The Knighthood weapon cosmetics for Escanor and BDM are considered must-buys
• Valenty's Weapon Researcher cosmetics available permanently as individual pieces from the Sacred Shop on June 16th for 30 diamonds per piece
• Limited time cosmetics are marked with "Event"; if not, then they are permanent fixtures
• Some limited cosmetics in the Sacred Shop have returned again later to buy for cash on JP (such as Black Flame and Howzer's weapon); however nothing has been confirmed for Global so treat limited as limited
• There is currently no confirmation that Escanor's Rhitta weapon cosmetic will be made available on Global again, however it has returned on JP via the Gold Coin Shop so it may in the future
• The Honor and Scars Holy Knight Set II cosmetics are on sale for cash until June 29th
• They will be available to buy as individual items from the Sacred Shop on June 30th until 13th July
• You will receive Diamonds for any cosmetics in the set that you already own when you buy a set

GEAR

• A Complete Guide to Gearing
• At the very minimum, you want to have three sets of ATK/DEF gear and one set of HP/DEF
• Once you've got decent gearsets for your main team, focus on their associates
• Having difficulty keeping track of your gear sets? Check out this awesome spreadsheet
• Base stats quality check chart for SSR gear
• In general, the substats you want are high percentages of the core stats - ATK; DEF; and HP
• For characters that have a particularly high base stat for things like pierce, crit etc; you may want to allocate some substat slots to boost it
• The base stats provide the most CC; with HP offering the highest
• Once you hit the 80% mark on the Failure Gauge when you are enhancing levels 1-3* on a piece of gear, switch to a 4* piece of gear in order to get a guaranteed enhance
• When building gear sets, it doesn't matter how you split them across your six slots e.g which four slots you put your Onslaught gear, and which two you put your Iron Wall gear
• Gear set effects stack e.g three sets of Iron Wall will give you three times the defense buff
• Anvils and hammers are rare and can only be acquired from events; gear draw; PVP; Knighthood Boss rewards; and the Training Grotto
• Anvils and hammers are best used to get the substats you want on your SSR gear
• Hammers increase stats by 0%-0.5% per use
• Always salvage in batches of 12
• Always +1 SR gear, and +1 or +5 SSR gear before salvaging
• C/UC/R gear can be salvaged without enhancing
• For those interested in the math behind the +1/+5 gear before salvage, check out this guide
• Exchange your 4* Awakening Stones for 5* stones
• Max level Awakening stones are for upgrading gear to UR
• The only characters you can currently engrave gear for are Diane; Gilthunder; Howzer; Valenti; Lillia; Hendrickson; and Dreyfus

CHARACTER GEARSETS

• Recommended gear for B Lilia is HP/DEF with some pierce substats in order to best take advantage of her passive
• Recommended gear for B Demon Meliodas is ATK/DEF with full pierce substats for full damage over CC
• Recommended gear for R Howzer is ATK/DEF with full pierce substats
• Recommended gear for associates are ones that match their mains, and with base substats e.g ATK; DEF; and HP

COMBAT

• How each of the hero stats work; in what order; and why they matter
• Wondering who, what, when, and where a sub slot characters unique passive applies? Here's a handy table
• You typically want to place the character you hope to get an auto-merge in card draw for on the first/left slot of your team comp
• Attribute advantage formula: Blue>Red;Red>Green;Green>Blue

PVP

• "Ungeared" is Normal PVP; "Geared" is Elite PVP
• The only stats that count in Normal PVP come from character level, Awakening level, registered cosmetics, ult level, and associations
• Weekly reset for Ungeared drops you one rank, but you cannot drop to a lower league
• Weekly reset for Geared drops you one rank, and you can drop to a lower league
• Weekly reset for Ranking Matches drops you to Champion 1 if you don't finish in the top 100; otherwise you stay
• 150k CC is the minimum recommendation for starting geared/elite PVP
• Use coin food for as long as you can (up to around 50/50 win rate) in PVP before switching
• Festival coins earned in PVP are used for purchasing geaother items in the PVP shop; with the best stuff to get being the UR cosmetic weapons, then anvils for gear
• You can start a PVP match with three ult orbs if you go second; have G Merlin on your team; and use ult food

DEATH MATCHES

• A Complete Guide to Death Matches
• What demons you get on Death Matches are completely random and dependent on what you have unlocked so far e.g Red; Grey; Crimson. There is a cosmetic on JP that does change this
• The 100-Day Anniversary Decoration Tavern cosmetic adds 120 minutes to Death Match timers
• Your teams passives only affect your team; not your teammates
• "CC" in combat refers to the use of "crowd control" skills; such as Petrify or Freeze
• Gold food is commonly used in Death Matches as the base gold drop is relatively high
• You can participate in as many invite Death Matches as you like

KNIGHTHOOD BOSS (EINEK)

• Recommended team comp is Escanor; Valenty; G LizHawk; and Jillian
• Substitution characters are G Liz; Hugo; R Merc Diane; R Slater; R Arthur; and Ruin
• HP/DEF gear sets are recommended for all characters
• A large amount of points will come from your total remaining HP
• You have to get through Einek's shield before you can apply debuffs
• The goal is to finish the fight with a powerful ultimate to deal overkill damage
• Strategy guide for F2P/No Valenty/No Escanor

TRAINING GROTTO

• Training Grotto Guide
• Recommended characters and strategies
• For level 1 and 2 matchs, no specific team build is really needed; just attribute advantage
• Higher level stage means better rewards
• You can freely leave and re-enter the Training Grotto
• You can eat food before matches
• You can have multiple attempts at a Training Grotto match until you win (it will still cost stamina each attempt)
• The main characters and sub character can only be used once
• Your main units only get locked out of re-use once you beat the stage
• Associate characters can be reused regardless of if they've been locked out
• "Spontaneous Missions" are randomly triggered; if you didn't get it you need to complete a match and hope it appears next time
• Using a Training Grotto key will reset the current Training Grotto; including progression and open duration

STORY

• Daily checklist of things you should do (does not include event specific tasks)
• A list of all the Affection Q&As for characters you can talk to
• Looking for friends? Check out the Friend Code Megathread
• Comfortable upgrade size for inventory is 150-200. Here's some tips on space management
• The red village quests are repeatable and are primarily used during free stage stamina decrease events to farm for SSR gear and food
• If you're stuck trying to 100% a village friendship; check the quests for any outstanding food or gear ones you haven't completed
• Episode 72 (Hendrickson Fight) Strategy Guide; alternatively just use youa friends G Meliodas and Full Counter on low HP

TAVERN

• If there is no-one in your tavern, you need to progress the Story quests and they should reappear
• A complete breakdown on what recipes/meals are best for generating passive gold
• Veronica will no longer appear or be able to be invited once you've cleared Chapter 7 [Episode 122] Druid Sacred Lands; however her buff is permanent from that point on
• You can get a daily PVP ticket (via Helbram's helmet in King's bedroom) and gold by entering gyro mode via Elizabeth in the Tavern and hovering over the sparkling items upstairs

KNIGHTHOODS

• Looking for a guild? Check out the Knighthood Recruitment Thread
• The main perks of joining a Knighthood are access to their unique shop, and the rewards; daily diamonds and treasure chests; weekly anvils and pendants
• If the Captain of the Knighthood does not log in for 14 days or more, the Vice Captain or another member will automatically be appointed as the new leader, and the previous Captain will be demoted to Vice Captain
• If there are multiple Vice Captains, the first member to have joined the Knighthood will be appointed as the new leader
• If there is no Vice Captain, the first member to have joined the Knighthood will be appointed as the new leader

NEW PLAYERS

• New player rerolling? Here's a breakdown of the most sought after characters, and why
• Get through as much of the main story quests as you can first as it unlocks additional game features e.g Death Matches; Knighthoods etc

FUTURE UPDATES

• Wondering about potential future character releases for Global? Here's a list of the JP release timeline
• 6/11 Dev Notes - Chapter 10; Final Boss Gowther; B Lilia & More

MISC

• Free Diamonds Breakdown - Daily/Weekly/Monthly
• You can play your same account across different devices. Just make sure to sync it first in the games menu
• Bluestacks is the most recommended system for playing on your PC
• Once you hit the CC requirement for a stat buff level (500k, 750k etc), it becomes permanent - even if you drop below that CC
• If you're working on the boost, the recommended gearset to put on unused characters is R quality HP/DEF, and awaken the Belt and Rune to 3* with HP substats
• The Weekly Diamond Bundle is considered the best value; followed by Monthly; then Rank Ups
• Emotes/Sticker Packs can be purchased from the Shop with cash in the Purchase Bundle section; and with diamonds in the Item Shop section

If you have any suggestions or recommendations for an amendment to a point in this FAQ, or the format of these posts, please leave them in the comments below. Thank you.