Five Minutes to Midnight Hub

Credits

Title: Centre De Minuit Moins Cinq
Author: DrJohannes
Translator: DrJohannes
Date Published: December 24th, 2021
Illustrations : DrJohannes

Five Minutes to Midnight

I walk, I crawl – What am I? What am I?

I rise, I fall – What am I? What am I?

Ten legs, five hearts - What am I? What am I?

Dead souls, spare parts - What am I? What am I?

It's the riddle of the sphinx, no one gets out alive

Puzzle harder than she thinks, cause the answer is Five

- Chorus of "Riddle of the Sphinx", Midnight Blossom

Five damaged characters. Five slices of life diving more and more into the anomalous side of things from 2009 to 2022, over a background of dying (then reborn) Emo/Scene subculture. Cringe. Glitter. Anomalous piercings. Emojis. Space cults. Literary screamo. Self-harm. Fluorescent prosthetics. Pancakes. Physical and abstract horror.

But after all, it's probably just a phase.

Status of the Series :

Type of series : Closed
Status : Finished
Author : DrJohannes
Number of Tales : 5 (plus 4 interludes)

Chapter 1 – Suicide Season

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"Seriously, the next time he screws up a practical demonstration, we should all get up and leave. Don’t you agree?" he insisted, clicking his pen.

"Fuck no. Imagine we're the only two assholes who get up?" she said while continuing to untangle the wires of her headphones.

Cyril shrugged. "I heard the sophomores from MPI class did it with their English teacher."

"I also heard the sophomores from MPI class are a bunch of fucking liars."

Interlude – Blog of a Crow

Chapter 2 – Folie à deux

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"I don't understand how that's possible," said Cyril, echoing Ada's thoughts as she mentally ran through all the chemical possibilities for achieving such a chromatic effect on human skin, and discarded them one after the other.

"Me neither!" exclaimed Astro. "Nobody understands how it works! All I know is that as soon as I was told about it, I knew it would be my thing."

Interlude – The Midnight Pond

Chapter 3 – Vices & Virtues

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"The noisier the better," he said, rearranging a stack of cups.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. Without all the noise, I feel super empty. You know that feeling when the bass vibrates so low you can feel it all the way to the back of your ribs? That's when I feel really alive."

He smiled again with all his teeth, the fluorescent prosthesis serving as the final point of his sentence.

Interlude – Left on "unread"

Chapter 4 – Danger Days

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She took his hand, which was shaking even more than hers.

Hurried footsteps on the stairs. Voices.

"You remember Burt's drawings in Mary Poppins?" he said hastily, looking over his shoulder.

"When they jump into the draw-" Ada began, but he had already leapt forward and she felt herself falling after him.

Interlude – Discography of Midnight Blossom

Chapter 5 – Minutes to Midnight

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There were currently two thousand people between them and her. And the last song of the set began.

The compressed spring of the audience's energy tightened a little more, at the risk of imploding the whole mechanism. Very recognisable chords rang out, followed by an urgent and desperate synth line. A hysterical laugh escaped from Ada's throat. Of course it was. Of course the last song was The End is a Beginning. What else?

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Why does this series exist?

During the nine-year anniversary contest of the -FR branch, where each participant could randomly draw a combination of a theme and an aesthetic, Dr Lekter drew "The Fifth Church" and "Scene", a combination that, to say the least, did not convince him, and which he abandoned - much to my chagrin, since the more I dug into Fifthism lore to try to help him, the more elements compatible with the Scene jumped out at me; at the same time, the more I delved back into the world of the Scene and its artists, the more aesthetics seemed compatible with the Fifth Church.

While writing my own story for the contest, I kept turning these ideas over and over in my head, and what started out as a dumb "dare I write a friend's most hated theme + aesthetic combo" bet on Discord gradually turned into a serious project. Early on I started to invent a whole imaginary band, their discography, their career, their lyrics. Drawings were made. Old skeletons were brought out of the closet. Way too many hours ended up being eaten by this project. And in the end, what started as a joke became rather therapeutic. So here we are, and here's this series of questionable taste.

What’s the ‘Scene’ anyway?

Toward the end of the big Emo wave of the early 2000s, some sort of offshoot emerged, combining the basic aesthetics of the movement with garish colors - the general mood was, basically, being fed up with the usual black and white clothes, and making the most of neon dyes, glitter, and multicolored flashing gifs. Aesthetically, some described the "Scene kids" as "happy Emos".
Music-wise, while the early Emo wave mostly swore by more or less aggressive variations of rock, punk rock and pop punk, the Scene was more into electronic music, metal and screaming, without disowning any of the bands liked by the first wave - all kinds of very abrasive music genres like metalcore, crunkcore, or deathcore flourished around that time, contrasting with the mostly colorful atmosphere of the subculture.
The Scene was also closely associated with MySpace and the explosion of online blogs, where it was drawing a lot of attention, and generating word-of-mouth about which new bands people could follow.

Like most subcultures associated with youth, its awkwardness, and its somewhat dramatic and over-the-top attitude, the Scene attracted (and still attracts) a lot of criticism; like all such subcultures in all eras since the very beginning of pop culture, there is good stuff as well as very bad stuff in it.

In recent years, as I write these lines (December 2021), some kind of resurgence of the Scene is happening, and the neon horror aesthetic is even more present now than in its heyday; this resurgence has inspired me a lot for the "visual" atmosphere of this series, especially the music videos of Drugs by Falling In Reverse, and Parasite Eve by Bring Me The Horizon (I must also mention Mantra by the same band ; that video is less neon-colored, but it’s so Fifthist it's not even funny).

Should we take the "self-harm" part of the summary seriously as a trigger warning?

Yes. Absolutely. A hundred percent.
Even though it kind of takes a back seat during the first couple of chapters, it becomes an important plot point pretty quickly.

The main theme of the whole story is self-destruction and some of the many aspects it can take; since we're on a website with a lot of horrific elements, it shouldn't be too shocking. However, I'm aware that the topic can have a little too much personal resonance for some; if you don't feel like reading something that talks quite frequently about suicide attempts, depression, weird body-horror and identity disintegration, this probably isn’t the series for you.

If you yourself are self-destructive in any way, the first thing you should do before it reaches dangerous levels is to talk about it to someone you trust in real life (not strangers on the internet), and seek help. Please treat it like an addiction before something irreversible happens.

The first chapter has literally no connection to the SCP Foundation.

This is one of the reasons why I absolutely wanted to post the whole series in one go and not one Tale after another. The anomalous elements develop slowly in this series from completely normal bases, or almost normal, only to explode in chapter 4, and it seemed important to me to have a first part anchored in reality before everything starts to go wrong. The first three chapters are mainly about getting the characters together, so the shit doesn't really hit the fan until chapter 4.

For the same reason, the length of the chapters increases with each one, because all the anomalous elements get more pronounced over time. I wanted to set the characters and the scene, but didn't see the point of spending too much time on the years when the anomalous stuff is not very present - therefore, chapter 5 is three times the size of the first one. Oops.

I'm trying to imagine Midnight Blossom's music but I'm having a little trouble.

This FAQ point has been added a posteriori following messages from two people on Discord. Of course, since Midnight Blossom is an imaginary band, the ideas used to create it are an amalgam of a lot of real bands. In the story, the music itself is successively described as some kind of fusion of screamo and electronic music on their first albums around 2009-2012, then their sound becomes more pop and mainstream around 2014, then they split up, and finally they reunite in the middle of 2020 (that happened to a lot of real bands!) and sound like a more competent version of what they did in their early days.

Long story short, it's an electronicore metalcore band but with literary ambitions, writing weird, bombastic, slightly bonkers lyrics, full of accidental Fifthist references, which accidentally becomes as cult as a major Scene band over the years.

But what would that sound like from a musical point of view, if we disregard the vaguely Fifthist literary lyrics? Most likely something like Enter Shikari circa 2007-2009 (Mothership, Solidarity), Secrets (Genesis) or I See Stars¹ (Filth Friends Unite) during the concert in Chapter 2. I like to think that their very first MySpace-era album sounded pretty lame, like Bionic Ghost Kids (Poison Ivy), because that's exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the mean review comparing them to Attack Attack. For their 2020-2021 resurgence via Tiktok, I was picturing Bring Me The Horizon's sudden reappearance into the mainstream when one of their old tracks (Can You Feel My Heart) went viral because of a Tiktok trend, except in Chapter 5 it happens with a recent track from Midnight Blossom, which would also accidentally contain a Fifthist meme. I hope this helps.

Wait, isn't Théo a character from another Tale?

That’s the main character of a crossover story I wrote in 2019, No-one very important. So, technically, it's a sort of prequel to Five Minutes to Midnight, including thematically. Théo only appears in chapter 3 of Five Minutes to Midnight, but he is there for a real reason, which should only become obvious at the very end.

What’s up with the titles of the chapters?

A musical private joke, and not a very smart one. It was way more cryptic in the original version since all the titles were in French. I couldn't resist. These are some album titles from five major bands of the era, respectively Bring Me The Horizon, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, My Chemical Romance, and Linkin Park. All these albums attracted some harsh criticism either from the fans, the critics, or, sometimes, both.

Cringe.

I hope so.

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Art

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Art by the author

Main characters (spoilers)

Bonsoir Paris (Chapter 2)

Four idiots on the subway (Chapter 2)

Ada and Théo (Chapter 3)

The Alchemist Adder (Chapter 4)

Homeless wanderer of the Library (Between Chapter 4 and 5) (spoilers)

Errare (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Tonight, negativity will die (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Right through the heart (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Let’s go, everyone get out (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Plan B (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Flatmates (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Going to the Library (some time during the ellipsis near the end of chapter 5) (spoilers)

Look at the sky I'm still here (Chapter 5) (spoilers)

Some doodles (spoilers)

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Fan Art

Riddle of the Sphinx (Seyph)

By Seyph

Characters (Al_W0onder)

By Al_W0onder

Ada (Anoure)

De Anoure

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Footnotes

1. I only just realized how perfect it was that two real bands used to describe a Fifthist band are called "Secrets" and "I See Stars". I swear I didn't even do it on purpose.