#but instead they just want every fucking property to appeal to the most people possible

[eroticwound]

i want d+ dd to prove me wrong so bad, but i need you to look me in the eye and tell me whether you think disney is gonna do anything within the realm of cut man, or the erotic shit between elektra and matt, or the fucking Neti Pot Scene™️

i’m just not buying that.

#daredevil #matt murdock #daredevil: born again #whump #i want to be proved wrong so bad but i’m so fucking stressed it’s gonna be some OOC lighthearted bs #again i don’t even think they’ll touch the catholicism #i really think even that’ll be too spicy #like i’m sorry disney/marvel just looks to water down everything to appeal to the most amount of people it’s so STUPID #like you have this massive stable of characters that you can use to draw disparate fans in with #but instead they just want every fucking property to appeal to the most people possible #insane #like they’re gonna mcuify my boy #and i’m gonna kill #like it would be such a betrayal to alienate the whump girlies who kept dd alive #like we kept it alive it’s for us

[honeybunnybeez]

If you want to you could write some C! Dream being soft around reader?

Secluded Cabin's and Gentle Touches

♡Pairing: Dream x GN!Reader (with hints of platonic!GN!reader x Tommy and Tubbo)

♡Genre: Fluff

♡Format: Fanfiction

♡Summary: It's not uncommon for Tommy and Tubbo to bring people over to your place so you can help calm them down after a prank, but today they seemed to drag by a familiar face that you have yet to properly spend time with. Lucky for you, he seems to be longing to talk to you as well.

♡Au Setting: Au where the war never happens but tensions are still high.

"Get back here!"

Despite the voice ordering them to stop, Tommy and Tubbo continued to run like their lives depended on it, and to be fair, it kinda did in this situation. Wet hands stained in different coloured dyes served as proof of their crimes and a green hooded man wearing an awfully smudged looking mask makes it clear who their latest prank victim was.

"What were we fucking thinking!?" but a laugh at the end of his yelling as he dodges Dream's outstretched hand makes it clear that Tommy doesn't regret his life choices at all.

"I don't know!" Tubbo on the otherhand, was starting to regret his involvement in the prank. His legs were starting to ache and his chest began to burn as he slowly became exhausted. A wild chase like this isn't exactly new to them but Dream's persistence really makes it hard for a person to catch a breather between runs. "Tommy, where are we even going!?"

Tommy opened his mouth to respond but a trail of scattered lanterns and torches answers Tubbo's question for him. Tubbo lets out a knowing, "ooooh!" And uses whatever remaining energy he can to keep up with Tommy, knowing exactly what his friend had in mind.

In the distance, they can see you sitting on your porch, playing with a parrot you had managed to tame while out searching for cocoa beans. Relief washes over them when you lock eyes with them and start jogging over with your bird in tow, a worried expression evident on your face.

They're quick to hide behind you when they get close enough, clutching the back of your shirt while trying to catch their breaths to answer your questions as to who they were running from this time and why.

"Dream-" is all Tommy can manage to wheeze out before he's coughing up a lung and swearing again.

"Ah," honestly, after knowing the pair for a good few years now, just mentioning a name gives you a pretty good idea of the type of prank they pulled and the danger they could be in. Thankfully, Dream wasn't a major threat, to you at least.

"Alright, alright, go hide in the house quickly and don't come out until I tell you guys to. If I die, make sure to take care of the farm animals and bees for me."

"Bless you, (y/n)."

"Your sacrifices won't be in vain, we promise!"

You give them a joking salute and urge them to go inside quickly, informing them that you can hear Dream approaching closer. Once the boys were safely inside, you tried your best to look as natural as possible with the limited time you had to adjust yourself. When Dream arrives, you can see that he's just as tired as the boys are thanks to the chase, though his stance continues to be tense as he frantically looks around for them, fists clenched tight until his knuckles turned ghost white.

"Fuck, where did they run off to?"

"Not gonna give a stranger a kind hello after walking onto their lawn with murderous intent?" You and Dream weren't really strangers per say, you had to meet up with him when you moved into the server after all, but due to conflicting schedules and how often Tommy and Tubbo dragged you away whenever he tried to make conversation, you two didn't know each other all that well. That doesn't mean that you didn't want to try though.

When Dream realizes where he was and who he was talking, he's quick to adjust his mask and hoodie to make himself look somewhat... presentable, as presentable as he can look with sweat marks and a messed up mask at least.

'Why did those two have to run up to your house out of all places,' Dream mentally whines to himself, clearing his throat and giving you a single awkward wave as he walks up to you.

"Hey, (y/n). I didn't know you lived in this part of the server," that was a lie. Dream did know where you live, he knew where everyone did but it would be a little creepy to just put that information out there, wouldn't it?

"It'd be a little weird if I just started screaming out my address to random people on the streets, wouldn't it?" You try to joke, earning a little laugh from Dream.

"Okay, yeah, you got me there."

You pat an empty spot beside you on your porch step, inviting Dream over for a bit of rest and he accepts your offer gratefully, practically slumping beside you as he suddenly feels just how tired he is.

"Love the new look you gave your mask by the way," Dream groans at your teasing and pulls at his hoodie strings, hoping to cover his whole mask with his hood. He's glad you can't see his face right now because he can feel his cheeks practically burning at the fact that when he finally gets a chance to talk and get close to you it's when he's a sweating tired mess who looks like a wreck at best.

"I'm going to kill those two when I find them," he mumbles under his breath.

The slam that follows within your home could not have been more terribly timed.

"What was that?"

"Must be my wolves," you lied through your teeth, knowing damn well that your actual wolves were sleeping in your bedroom, "they learned how to open doors recently, I think they're messing around at the moment."

While he's distracted, staring at your window to check what's going on inside of your home, you're quick to read through your most recent private messages on your communicator.

Tommy: HE'S HERE!

Tommy: (Y/N), WHY AREN'T YOU TELLING HIM TO FUCK OFF!?

Tommy: Fuck this, we're hiding in the kitchen.

Tubbo: We're making a run for it through the back.

Tommy: We'll hide in your barn like runaway children.

Tubbo: Isn't that what we technically are right now?

Tommy: (y/n), we're making a fucking run for it if you don't answer us in 3 seconds.

Tommy: 3!

Tommy: 2!

Tubbo: We'RE OUT! I REPEAT, WE'RE OUT!

"Yup," you pop your P a little at the end, annoyed yet amused at the string of frantic messages still continuing to pop up on your communicator as they make their escape, "definitely my wolves causing all of that chaos."

Dream knows that you're lying from the way you read through your messages but he doesn't say a word about it, choosing instead to take this golden opportunity to get closer to you without worrying about anyone getting in the way.

"Not really how you thought the day would go, huh?"

You can't help but laugh and shake your head, "Not at all, I thought it was just going to be another boring day with my bird, but hey, I'm glad you showed up to make it a little more special."

"Really?" Dream hates how happy he sounds to hear you say that, but he'll beat himself up over it another time.

"It's not everyday you see Mr. WasTaken himself visiting your humble home, now is it?" Oh, or maybe he won't.

"I guess not, that really should change, shouldn't it?" You can hear the little grin in his voice as he realizes the game your playing.

"It really should, but a quick heads up would be good, unless you'd like to deal with said 'wolves' I mentioned earlier."

He chuckles and shakes his head, mentioning how he's more than aware that those two 'wolves' of yours would probably rip him apart if he ever visited you unannounced.

It isn't long before you invite Dream inside, offering to help clean his mask as an apology on the boys's behalf. He claims that he doesn't mind but he would rather not take his mask off in front of you when he hasn't gotten to know you all that well.

"You don't have to remove it if you feel uncomfortable, I'll just wipe away whatever I can with a cloth, but if you're still hesitant, I'd understand."

He takes a moment to consider your offer, trying to see if you have any other ulterior motives. It's not that he doesn't want to trust you, he does, but sometimes you just have to be a little extra cautious even with people you like. Sensing no ill intent on your part though, he relaxes himself once more and accepts your help, letting his hood finally loosen and fall back to ease your process.

Your actions are incredibly comforting to Dream who can't help himself from leaning into your touches every once in a while. He watches you with his fullest attention as you wipe away the mess on his mask with a damp cloth. He loves how focused you look while doing so, taking in every little quirk you may have while you concentrate. His little crush on you that he's harboured ever since he saw you running around the server can't help but grow every second you give him your attention.

There's a certain draw to you that Dream can't fight off no matter how hard he tries, you just manage to hold a certain power over him and that was evident by the fact that he completely lost interest in continuing his hunt for Tommy and Tubbo even after finding out that they were still most likely on your property. Dream was a persistent man, he was never one to simply drop something with no proper reason at all. There was just this appeal to you that he couldn't describe and he was desperate to find out what it was about you that made him act differently than he normally would.

"Okay then, that's the last of it," he has to stop himself from letting out a whine when you pull your hands away from his mask, he wants to say something to try to get you to continue on longer but decides against it, not wanting to seem desperate. His eyes don't leave you even after you pull away, watching you rinse off the dirty cloth before throwing it into what seemed to be a bin filled with laundry. When you return to sit by his side, he can't help but swallow a bit of his pride to rest his head on your shoulder. It's a big risk to take, but at least he has an excuse for his actions if he ever needs it.

"Tired, Dream?"

"Mhmm," he feels himself melt when you let your fingers run through his slightly sweat damp hair, clearly unphased by the state of it much, to his joy.

"You wanna rest here for a while? I'm sure you could get a good nap in before leaving."

"That depends, can I still use you as my pillow?"

"Not like I have anything else to do for the rest of the day, knock yourself out."

"Then if you'll excuse me," his head is quick to leave your shoulder to instead rest in your lap and the blissful sigh he lets out escapes his lips before he can even stop himself. You just feel so comfortable to him. "I'm gonna drift off, wake me up in an hour or so, will you?"

You let out a hum in response and it isn't long before you start to see Dream's body go slack, his breathing now steady and deep as he slowly falls asleep. It's quite endearing seeing Dream act so affectionately towards you, something you certainly didn't expect from a guy who carries himself with a subtle wave of authority, but you definitely weren't complaining as you continued to play with his hair once again.

Dream would never tell a single soul about it, but this was quiet possible the best sleep he's gotten in years, if he even tried to sleep at all to begin with. The thought to just slow down and relax is never really on his mind, his head always spinning with things he has to do. However, with you, he's glad to know that he can look to you for comfort from now on, something he now realizes is rather hard to find on the server. It pains him to know that he'll have to leave in just a few moments but for now, he'll take what he can get from you and maybe, if you let him, he'll be sure to return your sweet gestures tenfold one day.

A/N: Hello, everyone! I am so sorry for being absent recently, I know the writer's block excuse can only go so far but- yeah ^^' I'm so sorry again for everything and I'm sorry if this isn't what you were hoping for anon! Thank you so much for the rquest and feel free to request it again if you want me to remake this to hopefully suit what you wanted. Anyways, I hope you all have a good day and thank you so much for reading!

(Requests are open and anon is on!)

#mcyt x reader #mcyt imagine #dream smp x reader #dream smp imagine #dream x reader

[centrally-unplanned]

Medium & Marketing for 90′s Anime Dubs

Today is Hayao Miyazaki’s 80th birthday, which made sure my dash was filled with Ghibli tidbits. A discussion of my personal favourite, Kiki’s Delivery Service, brought up its ill-fated original dub by Disney in 1998. Ghibli still didn’t have the courage yet to put their foot down on changes for international releases, and so there are a lot of alterations - the theme songs are changed to be anglicized, almost any “dead space” or quiet moments in the film have someone (normally animal sidekick Jiji the cat) improv lines over the scenes to liven them up, and in particular the ending is changed to be less bittersweet as Jiji, who in the original Kiki permanently loses the ability to talk to as a sign of growing up, regains his voice.

These changes slot neatly into the zeitgeist of all 90′s anime changes - a disregard for the property’s core appeal as they were bowdlerized for a western audience. Sailor Moon is an infamous victim of a similar process - at least Kiki took place in fantasy Europe, the Sailor Moon dub’s attempts to pretend that the show doesn’t take place in Japan were simply insane as they cut out or blurred every appearance of Japanese writing in the show, leaving reams of animation frames on the floor in the process.

(Tangent time: the greatest scene ever is one where, upon reading a note by Usagi, to prove it was her Minako/Sailor Venus comments “it must be from her, its written entirely in hiragana”, the simpler form of written Japanese compared to kanji, which Usagi as a running gag cannot write. So in the dub they just...blur out the text of the note, and have Minako comment “I had to read it with my imagination. It's all written in funny symbols!". I distinctly remember watching the episode live when I was 12 years old and going “wait what the fuck does that even mean?” and suddenly realizing that the show was changing its own script, it was a trip of a moment)

Like most people I do malign these changes, but I am actually here to partially defend them via contextualization. The idea that American audiences would have cared that the show was Japanese is pretty dumb, but what you often hear are statements like “kids in Japan appreciated Sailor Moon/Kiki’s Delivery Service just fine, they didn’t need to change it”. That is possible, but it mistakes why changes are being made to begin with - its not the “culture of children in the US vs Japan”, its intended market via the medium of distribution.

Kiki’s Delivery Service was released in Japanese theatres in 1989, and it was the highest grossing film of the year in Japan (about ~US$18 million, man do things change). Kiki’s Delivery Service the Disney dub, was....released on VHS in 1998. VHS releases and movie theatre releases aren’t really intended accomplish the same thing. Remember all those direct-to-video Disney sequels? Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride? Cinderella 3: A Twist in Time? Remember how they were all just garbage? Anyone looking back at them today cringes, with a few exceptions. But none of us cringed when we were 8! My partner is a huge Disney fangirl, and when she was young she didn’t even distinguish between the theatre release and the VHS sequels - it was all Disney, you just lined them up and played them in a row as the complete canon. Yes, these movies sucked partially because they were low budget, but they weren’t actually *that* low budget - and not the throwaways your memory probably tells you they were. Lion King 2? Made ~$300 million in net sales, almost as much as the original Lion King’s theatrical run.

What those Disney VHS sequels and Kiki share is the fact that their intended market was *only* children. That is the point of VHS - you put it on for your kids and then go make dinner. Its the virtual babysitter, the kids can loop it while reenacting every scene with their stuffed animals. Movies released in theatres don’t serve that role at all - the parents are paying $15 a head and they are trapped in their seats for the whole runtime. It has to entertain everyone, or you aren’t going to go, or at least not as often. VHS releases sucked because kids don’t care, they actually do enjoy the constant quippy lines and dumb jokes. That is equally true for Japanese kids - its just that Kiki’s intended audience wasn’t Japanese kids, it was “all ages” - a very different category.

The same is true for Sailor Moon, by the way. The idea that kids in Japan could “handle more mature themes like death” unlike American audiences doesn’t hold up quite as much when you look at Disney theatrical releases like the Lion King - Mufasa’s death pulls no punches, but kids didn’t mind. And Japan does have shows like Doraemon that are just as childish as the 90′s western cartoons you remember. Its that Sailor Moon’s audience wasn’t just kids. 

Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon aired in March of 1992 on TV Asahi. Asahi was not a kids network, and Sailor Moon did not air in a kid’s block - instead in its “Anime Block”. It aired on Saturdays, at 7:00 PM. For most of its runtime, the 7:30 slot after was held by Slam Dunk, a hyper-serious basketball anime adapted from a manga in Weekly Shonen Jump. You think director Kunihiko Ikuhara was throwing in queer relationships and even trans characters, and every other villian was a half-naked seductress, because it was gonna really resonate with 8 year olds? Sailor Moon was for 8 year olds, yes...and for otaku. So, 15 year olds, lets not exaggerate here. But still, its hype, its success, came just as much from its teen and adult fans as much as its young devotees. Which was intentional - it was *marketed* that way. That's why it aired at 7:00 PM on a Saturday. 

Sailor Moon’s original dub, on the other hand, aired on UPN at, yeesh, 6:30 AM?? Then on USA’s Cartoon Express at the much more reasonable 8:30 AM, and later on Toonami at 4:00 PM. All of these are kids slots, to watch over cereal or snacks before/after school while the parents are busy. You do not expect the adult in the room to be watching alongside the kid, or for teens to really be paying attention.

And to cut off the logical objection, a show like Sailor Moon was just not going to get a 7:00 PM Saturday slot in the US in the 90′s. Nor was Kiki going to get a movie theatre release in 1998 of any scale. Movie releases are expensive, Saturday slots are precious, the funding just wasn’t there for something so untested as Japanese anime. There was no demand in the west for it - that demand would only be created later, by a generation who grew up on, well, shitty Sailor Moon dubs and Kiki VHS releases. And what success in the media slots these shows and movies did have are shaped by those market niches.

I don’t want to be over-deterministic on this - at some point Cartoon Network rolled the dice on Cowboy Bebop and Full Metal Alchemist and it worked - maybe they could have done that in 1995 with like Neon Genesis Evangelion, who knows! And of course US children’s cartoons are, beyond market forces, burdened with regulatory moralizing that Japanese media does not have. But I do think these 90′s dub efforts should get the proper context for the constraints they were operating under, and why they existed at all, as they are criticized.

#kiki's delivery service #sailor moon #90's dub discourse never dies

[gunnerpalace]

And I’m 💯 sure that you’re blocked and you can eat it.

But I would like to talk about this idea a little, actually. So, here are a couple of points:

The thing that a lot of modern-day “Bleach fans” don’t get is that as far as Japan is concerned, the only thing that really sells Bleach to the mass-market general audience is Ichigo and Rukia interacting. The hard truth those “Bleach fans” refuse to accept is that most of fights sucked, most of the mysteries sucked, and other than the two of them (and maybe Toushirou and Byakuya) most of the characters aren’t interesting to the average person. If you liked Bleach for any of those three reasons (or any other minor reasons), then you are in the absolute minority of nerds.

The cold, iron truth of economics is that you sell media properties in one of two ways: either by drilling down to a highly dedicated fanbase (e.g., moe-blob anime with extremely jacked-up Blu-ray prices) or by appealing to as wide and shallow an audience as possible (e.g., the Marvel Cinematic Universe). The interesting thing with Bleach is that those two audiences, by the numbers, are actually interested in the same thing: Ichigo and Rukia, and more particularly, IchiRuki.

Bold claim, I know. But you don’t have to look hard to see it. This is why the musicals were focused on them. This is why the LA movie was focused on them. And this is why both of those deemphasized other ancillary characters, especially Ichigo’s human friends like Chad—or Orihime: because they are essentially irrelevant to that largely singular fixture of the series and are forgettable other than to some hardcore nerd. (The only other thing that comes remotely close to being as iconic are the Soul Society fights, especially Ichigo vs. Byakuya.)

This is also why every time the property has been reinvented for a new market (again, e.g., the musical and the LA movie) the focus has always been on early Bleach: because it most showcases their interactions and establishes their foundational emotional connection. This is in large part why arcs that more and more deemphasized their interactions suffered increasingly worse sales, to the point that Bleach was consistently ranked 20th out of 20 in Weekly Shounen Jump’s ratings on a week-to-week basis. Less Ichigo and Rukia, and especially less Ichigo and Rukia together, means less sales. This is why TYBW and WDKALY sold abysmally, and I’m willing to bet that CFYOW’s numbers aren’t too great either considering it features neither of them at all.

This is furthermore why Studio Pierrot gave them so many moments, like the ice-skating and fireworks date that they used to send off the anime: because IchiRuki sells. And not much else does.

So, having established that, let’s talk about your idea.

Ichika and Kazui don’t make sense, because their existence in TYBW isn’t established. They simply appear, like the rest of the ending, with no buildup or explanation. In other words, there is no reason to invest in them as characters; they are simply designs walking and talking on a page. (And surprise, the only people who cared “about” them at all were people like you who were pleased as punch that it was evidence that Ichigo and Orihime, and Rukia and Renji, fucked. And even you lot don’t care about them, because there is nothing about them to possibly care about. You care about them as symbols and nothing more.)

However, what would make even less sense is to introduce them without having TYBW at all. For the anime to jump from Ichigo and Rukia having an ice rink not-date to having Ichika and Kazui running around in their places would be a bit like jumping from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, to Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens in 1983, instead of having Return of the Jedi. It really isn’t possible to overstate how much that big of a leap would lose an audience, whose reactions would be, “What the fuck is this? What happened?”

As I have previously calculated, animating TYBW would take about 4–5 seasons and about 3–4 years of production. So, unless you wanted to pull one of the strangest continuations ever in media history, you’d be waiting for that to wrap first, and presuming its financial success (which is dubious, for the above outlined reasons, and its relative historical print failure which got the manga cancelled).

Setting all that aside, Ichika and Kazui are not photocopies of Rukia and Ichigo; they are genderflipped photocopies of Renji and Orihime. There is a reason why, despite the best efforts of IH here on Tumblr Dot Com, the IR community has never warmed up to them: why would you take a cheap clone knockoff that can’t even trace the original properly when you could just have the original? This will likewise hold true for a general audience. If a random-ass person in Japan knows anything at all about Bleach, it’ll be Ichigo and Rukia. Going, “This isn’t them, but here’s the same great taste but less filling!” is going to get you a response of, “No thanks.”

Setting that aside, what exactly would be the premise? The Espada were retconned in from the aether and people were fine with them, since they were basically just the inverse and mirror of the Shinigami. But people didn’t much care when Xcution were retconned in from the aether. And they didn’t like it when Yhwach and the Sternritter were retconned in from the aether. And they really don’t care now that Tokinada, Hikone, and Aura were retconned in from the aether. Are you really going to have a fifth group of baddies we never even vaguely heard of before showing up? Or are you going to just recycle a set? “Oh, no, Aizen has escaped Muken and has made the Super Fullbringer Espada…” Please. The concept is tapped out: it either has to keep inventing new bullshit and pretending it was always around, or it has to recycle the same ideas but in a less exciting way. Or it has to be rebooted.

It is clear that something or other is happening with regard to Bleach for this “anniversary” event, but the evidence, in my eyes, doesn’t match what you would see for TYBW being animated, let alone for some kind of Boruto-style series.

The event has been marketed in a rather low-key fashion, which is weird considering the 2020 Olympics are a once-in-a-generation event which provide the perfect hype vehicle (and which Shueisha has been using to push other WSJ properties). If you were working on a large or risky project, you’d want a lot of hype—either to prepare the audience, or to maximize your initial buy-in and returns if it’s going to flop (e.g., Anthem). Being cautious indicates both the scale and risk are small.

The emphasis on the voice actors who are appearing at the event are all for classic and popular characters: Ichigo, Byakuya, and now Rukia. You know what fans don’t like? Having a bait-and-switch pulled on them where their classic faves are affiliated with something, only for them to be radically deemphasized in the actual final product. (Just look at the three recent Star Wars movies for some proof of that one.) It is far more likely to be something focused around them.

MegaHouse is making new Bleach figurines this year. But the designs they’ve chosen so far are… Fake Karakura battle Armored Yoruichi (who I’m excited for), and Hueco Mundo style unreleased Grimmjow. If you were going to make merchandise for TYBW or a next-generation show, it’d make a lot more sense for that merch to be… actually related to those events, rather than “classic” designs, now wouldn’t it? To go to the Star Wars well again, they weren’t trying to sell Qui-Gon Jinn or Lando Calrissian toys with The Last Jedi.

To me, all the evidence indicates that whatever it is will be some sort of “Greatest Hits” OVA or something like that, with a focus on the Aizen era of the series. Maybe a lot of the “best” battles redone in really high quality. Maybe a video game. Maybe a reboot of the series from the start. Hard to say. But it doesn’t look an awful lot like TYBW, let alone a next-generation effort.

Now, I’m not saying that either of those things are impossible. I’ve been wrong before in this life (for example, I didn’t think Putin would invade Crimea), and I will be wrong again. I could be wrong about this too. I can only speak in probabilities.

But what I will say with confidence is that committing to TYBW would be fairly dumb as a business decision given everything that is evident about what makes Bleach sell.

And committing to a next-generation series at this stage before doing TYBW would be even dumber.

And doing a next-generation series without doing TYBW would be even dumber still.

Now, stupid people are in ascendancy worldwide in all kinds of endeavors, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone greenlit something so dumb. But if they did, I don’t think it’s going to do so hot.

So, good luck, I guess.

#Asks

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine the Batkids hanging out at like....the food court of a mall or something, Jason keeping paparazzi at bay with finger guns that manage to be wildly ominous even if the gulping paparazzo have no true idea WHY that particular motion from this particular man has cold beads of sweat breaking out on the backs of their necks. Damian loudly proclaiming he hates everything and everyone even though he only half means it, well at least until Tim asks if he needs them to go get him a booster seat. To which Jason stops long enough to cackle about Tim finally finding someone he can actually literally look down on, it must be like Christmas for him, and meanwhile, Duke idly says to no one in particular that he can never decide if he accidentally got adopted into the Addams family, the Manson family or the Kardashians.

“I would be great at being a Kardashian,” Jason muses.

“Well you’re already 90% ass, so you’ve got that going for you,” Steph chirps brightly.

“Die, but for real this time,” Jason volleys back, equally pleasantly.

“I can’t believe the English major is suggesting I plagiarize him,” Steph says with eyes wide in mock bewilderment. Jason scoffs.

“What English major? In case you’ve forgotten, I never even finished high school, I was busy being de - “

He cuts off as Cass holds out her palm and Dick and Duke both slide ten dollar bills across the table to her, accompanied by groans. Tim jabs a finger at her with a scowl, half rising out of his seat in outrage.

“That doesn’t count, he didn’t even finish saying it!”

“Also, you’re cheating,” Damian adds on hotly, too incensed to notice he’s literally standing in solidarity with his most hated enemy. Though Tim catches it, if the slightly constipated look on his face is anything to go by. “Do you really think us so blind we can’t tell that Brown blatantly set that one up for you?”

“Don’t hate the players, hate the game,” Steph says sagely, as she and Cass split the take.

“What the hell just happened?” Jason asks. No one looks anywhere near the zip code of apologetic.

“Well we definitely didn’t all get together once a majority of us had done the knock knock knocking on death’s door thing ourselves and wound up making a long-standing bet about how long you can go without bringing that up and where the clock restarts each time you do,” Steph says thoughtfully, eyes intent even as she stares off into the distance, like it’s an actual mystery and she’s really trying quite hard to scry out the answer.

“What?” Jason says flatly.

“In my defense, they were doing it long before I came along and they said it was like, a family tradition,” Duke offers.

“I mean, it’s not like we lied,” Tim shrugs. “Besides, it was Cass’ idea and she’s died twice, so it’s allowed.”

Jason redirects his ire on their sister. “Why are you the worst.”

She shrugs. “I died.”

“I used to think having a sister would be cool. I can’t believe you ruined sisters for me.”

“Bite me, little brother,” she says sweetly. His face flames. Detonation imminent.

“I’m older than you!”

“Not if you don’t count the six months you were dead,” she sing-songs. “Besides, Tim’s lying. It was his idea.”

Jason’s head swivels like a turret-mounted missile launcher. Tim chokes on his French fry.

“What the hell! That’s not tr - .” He trails off then, frowning slightly. “Wait, was it? Oh. Right.”

Jason’s eyes narrow, tension on the trigger, but Tim rallies and just shrugs unrepentantly.

“Eh. You’ve tried to kill me like three times. Suck it up.”

“Next time, I’ll be sure to try harder,” Jason growls. Tim smiles serenely and takes an extra obnoxious slurp of his milkshake.

“See? You’ve learned something new today. You’re welcome.”

“Why am I not live-tweeting this,” Steph wonders, yanking out her phone and sending digits swiftly flying across its keys. Dick leans over on her left to view her screen.

“Are you tweeting as Batgirl about her fellow vigilantes, or the random blond stranger always seen out with the Waynes but that no one can determine their connection to?”

“First off, I’m the EXOTIC blond stranger, excuse you. Get it right. And second...idk. Either. Both. Does it really matter?”

“Well, it might if you actually do tweet the same content from both accounts and someone somehow manages to spot some kind of connection,” Tim says dryly. Steph scowls without looking up from her phone.

“Stop oppressing my shenanigans with your logic, Timbleton.”

“Timbleton?”

“It’s my new name for you. For it is both pretentious and douchey, as are you.”

Tim glowers. “Sometimes I honestly can’t remember why I went out with you.”

She shrugs. “You were a fifteen year old virgin and I have a killer rack. It wasn’t that deep.”

“Hey, you are still just the exotic blond stranger seen with us all the time, right?” Dick says suddenly, seemingly lost in thought. “Like, B didn’t adopt you since I last saw you or anything.”

“No, and you know you don’t ACTUALLY have to ask me that every time you see me.”

He shrugs. “I mean I kinda do. You are always here, and it is Bruce. It’s not like he ever tells me when he adopts someone new so like, you could be my sister for four years before I even realized it if I didn’t ask.”

“Ooh. A sighting of Dick angst, spotted in the wild. Those are rare,” Jason snickers. Dick just eyes him.

“FYI, I still have footage of a certain Robin, age fourteen, singing Backstreet Boys. And I have Roy on speed dial. Tread lightly, Little Wing.”

“You said you deleted that!”

“I lied. I do that sometimes. I’m terribly problematic.” Dick beams beatifically.

“Why have I not seen this footage?” Steph shrieks.

“Make me an offer,” Dick says as leans back smugly.

She wastes no time, fingers dancing across her keyboard again, and moments later Dick pulls out his own phone and reads her incoming text. One eyebrow arches significantly.

“That’s an offer, alright.” He frowns. “You came up with that quick. I’m either impressed or disturbed.”

Steph shrugs. “I get bored on stakeouts sometimes.”

“You can be dispressed,” Cass pipes up helpfully. Dick nods solemnly.

“An excellent suggestion, Cassandra, thank you. Just for that, I’ll send it to you too.”

“I will stab you,” Jason says dangerously.

“Just think, Jay, if you didn’t try and stab me all the time already, that might actually be incentive not to....oh whoops, finger slipped, just hit send, how terrible, much regret.”

“I feel like there’s supposed to be a life lesson in there somewhere,” Duke murmurs.

“Stay out of this, new kid on the block.”

“Does that make you Marky Mark or like, Donnie?” Tim wonders idly. He shakes his head at himself then, baffled. “Why do I know the names of the New Kids on the Block?”

Stephanie meanwhile is watching her phone with what can only be described as naked glee. It’s muted - she’s never one to share her spoils freely after all - but apparently that is more than good enough for now as far as she’s concerned. Beside her, Cass intently stares at her own screen, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.

“I will kill you all someday, and when I do the courts will rule it justifiable homicide and I shall be vindicated.”

“Please, Todd. As if I don’t have contingencies in place to ensure you receive my vengeance even from beyond the grave, should I ever perish at your hands.”

Silence falls across the table as they all stare at Damian.

“See, now I’m dispressed,” Tim says. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to take a guided tour of your brain, but then I think why not wait til Halloween and sell tickets too.”

Damian glares at him, but to the surprise of everyone, Tim included, he reacts no further than that. A few seconds later though, Duke bolts upright in his chair across from him, directing his own baleful glare at the smaller boy. Damian just stares at him meaningfully and jerks his head in Tim’s direction. Duke rolls his eyes and sighs.

“Shut your facehole, Drake, you blithering dolt,” Duke says robotically. “Also, you are excessively diminutive for your age and nobody likes you. Allegedly.”

Once more silence reigns supreme.

“Oh fuck, can he possess people now?” Jason asks.

Dick waves them all down, gesturing for quiet before he takes the lead, studying Duke with an intent focus. “I think I speak for all of us here, when I say: no, but seriously, what the actual fuck.”

Cass nods gravely. “What he said.”

Duke shrugs a half-hearted apology. “It’s nothing personal Tim. It’s just that Damian and I have an alliance, and part of the terms are I have to defend his honor, since - and I quote - ‘tt, the very notion I need assistance defending my actual person is laughable, Thomas, don’t be daft.’”

“Wait, we’re doing alliances now?” Steph asks, because of course that would be the part that catches her attention. “I want an alliance. Cass, make an alliance with me.”

“Kay.”

“Whose idea was this alliance, anyway?” Jason asks. Duke just shrugs again, this time defensively.

“Hey don’t look at me, Dick’s the one who apparently thought it was a good idea to introduce Damian to Survivor reruns.”

All eyes turn to the eldest. In a particularly accusatory fashion.

Well, with the exception of Damian, as he has returned to his meal and is quite contentedly dining with a distinct air of smugness about him. (Even more so than usual.)

“What? I couldn’t get him to agree to watching anything else on TV, and then we came across some reruns and I thought it might appeal to him.”

“And you saw no potential drawbacks to him seeing appeal in the basic premise of voting people off the island?” Jason asks skeptically. Dick picks up a fry and studies it with clear deliberation and an equally clear attempt at avoidance. Subtlety, thy name is not Grayson.

“In hindsight, it’s possible mistakes were made.”

“I mean, at least now Dami’s attempts at casting undesirables out of the family are rooted in democracy instead of totalitarianism. That’s progress, right?” Steph asks. Heavy on the uncertainty.

“Right, and I have some beachfront property in Kansas to sell you,” Tim says sardonically.

“Nah, you keep it. I’ll just get it in the divorce when we get back together in ten years, marry, and I abscond with half of your fortune.”

“Wait, what?”

“Shh, just let it happen.”

“Hang on, back to this alliance,” Jason says, turning back to Duke. “So what are you getting out of it?”

“Oh, he has to do my calc homework for the rest of the semester,” Duke replies.

“Duke, you should have just told one of us you needed some help with your homework,” Dick says with an unmistakable note of concern in his voice. Duke shoots him a quizzical look.

“I don’t. I just don’t want to do it.”

“This is why Duke is the most valid,” Steph nods knowingly. Cass nods in agreement.

“Hey, did nobody else notice that in essence, Damian implicitly admitted he needed help protecting his feelings from getting boo-boos,” Tim pipes up oh so casually. The youngest among them narrows his eyes.

“In my spare time, I peruse the occult tomes recommended by Raven and the Zatara brat in search of a ritual that will make it so you never existed in the first place,” he says, matching his tone to Tim’s conversational one. Not deterred in the slightest, Tim just adopts an expression of over the top faux sympathy.

“Sucks you can’t just ask me for help. I already know where one of those is.”

“Dami, no!” Dick speaks up sharply. Their little brother slumps back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I wasn’t actually going to do anything, Grayson,” he sulks. Dick snorts.

“You were absolutely about to jump on top of the table and kick Tim in the face. Don’t even try and pretend I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I was an only child once,” Jason muses. “I should have appreciated it more.”

“But then you couldn’t form an alliance with me, little brother,” Cass points out, equal parts sweetness and wickedness. He hesitates, visibly torn between wanting to protect his vaunted older brother status and agreeing to an alliance with the most feared of them all.

“You’re evil.”

She shrugs but doesn’t contest the point.

“I’ll form an alliance with you, Cass,” Tim says, smirking at Jason.

“No thanks.”

Tim’s mouth falls open and he looks between her and his now cackling older brother. “What the hell? You’ll form an alliance with Steph and Jason but not with me? Why not?”

“I’m chaotic neutral,” their sister explains sunnily, as she steals some more of Dick’s fries.

#look they all actually so love each other okay #this is just how siblings are #just like #with less actual murder attempts

[maswartz]

IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave. 

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

#bernie sanders

[mdjonah]

wiccapediaowen‌:

Owen was used to a lot of academic and theoretical magic, testing the limits of what it was and using it to strengthen young witches. Magic during his daily life always had a purpose. It was good to be reminded that sometimes magic could just be….nice. It could be hedonistic and warm and fun. Obviously a daylight ring would be practical and serve the very real purpose of protection, but the end goal was to feel the sun and something about that was so pure and simple that it stole the air out of his lungs. There was so much humanity left to protect in Jonah. Many witches were happy to destroy other species and build defenses against them, and Owen had done plenty of the latter. But why had he never focused more on this part? Protecting the goodness before immortality burned it away for good. He sensed that it would take more work than getting the vampire tipsy and letting himself be kissed under streetlights in a dangerous city. You should have let me leave when you had the chance. I’ll keep tabs on you until the end of time now. “I’m offering. But it will take time. Be patient with me.” Because he had changed his mind already - there was no way he was outsourcing this job. He’d just have to do the research and do the magic himself. It was a skill he should already have mastered, he just didn’t interact with enough vampires to ever practice, and he didn’t need to worry about selling the expensive items for money when he could make literal gold out of most of the base metals. This wasn’t a task he could trust anyone else with anymore. “I want to be there, the first time you use it. In case the enchantment goes wrong. Amongst other reasons.”

Jonah turned his palm to link their fingers and Owen was entranced by the sight. Such a simple and intimate romantic thing, yet something he never indulged in. And nothing he would have expected from someone he assumed was looking for a hookup in a bar. Who went from seeking a nameless fuck to looking for excuses to hold hands? He had severely misjudged Jonah. That or Owen was just an easy mark. He wanted to rip the doubts out of his head and full on commit to trusting him, but he didn’t really know how. The witch had told him too much about magic, promised him something worth a small fortune, and almost let him come close to the Academy. “Stop,” he groaned, half teasing and half serious as his looked up at the ceiling to get himself under control. What was he supposed to do? Jonah had just told him he could hear his heartbeat, the very thing that kept him alive, and it was so shockingly personal that his heart stuttered in its rhythm. Not to mention he kept dropping the word sexy around like it applied, like it wasn’t out of place.

“It’s complicated,” he shrugged off the question about why he left the leak where it was. Unless Jonah wanted a lecture on the properties of rain water versus naturally occurring groundwater versus water in constant motion through metal man made pipes. There was no middle ground for him, it was all or nothing. It wasn’t like he just had a metal bucket shoved under there either - now it had turned more into a small pond in the floor he had to figure out magical drainage for. He blinked blankly at Jonah when he painted a pretty accurate picture of Owen in wool in front of a fire when it rained, curled up with a book. ““Forget vampire kinks, I think you might have a librarian kink. That initial drink makes so much more sense now. What would have happened if I had worn a sweater with elbow pads?” Now it was his turn to study, to judge Jonah based on what he did when it rained. He loved the smell too, all versions of it. “Petrichor. It’s one of my favorite words. The smell of the earth when it rains after a long time of warm dry weather.” The thought of Jonah at work was equally endearing, helping those that lost control of their cars in the rain. A dark thought crossed him, and he asked the question as casually as possible in the hopes of getting the real answer. If Jonah was attacking patients, he didn’t know how he’d handle it. “Does your control ever slip around patients? Being around all that blood must be hard.”

“There was this underwater Mayan city, once. I barely got to go in, I was there more for historical references and emergency backup in case anything was booby trapped with protection spells. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Most beautiful place he’d ever seen, he mentally corrected as he watched Jonah talk about his sire. Fuck, he was pretty. It must be a vampire thing, something about the transformation that made people more attractive so hunting was easier. “So it’s a chemical thing? That bond. I’ve heard of it, but I didn’t realize how strong it was. To block out hate like that.” Owen shrugged. He was revealing too much about magic. He was putting other witches at risk because he missed being looked at the way Jonah was looking at him. Owen tried to keep it as brief as possible. “You choose what you want to study, but every witch has a primary strength and a secondary. Some have a third or a fourth natural talent. You can improve in any area of magic with time and practice, though.”

His hands flew to his lips when he was back in his seat, the same feeling tingly feeling there that he got in his fingertips when he did any sort of casting. Owen shook his head, endlessly amused by how eager Jonah was to walk him in the direction of the Academy. He was ready to turn him down - and then a hand was being offered up, the perfect mirror image to what he had done earlier. Do you trust him? It was such a small moment, thoroughly unimportant to an outsider, but he knew he had come to an internal breaking point. All in or all out. “Okay.” His hand slipped in Jonah’s, using the leverage to get up from the small table. The night air felt good on his flushed skin when they made it outside. He linked arms, steering them both in the right direction. His whole body was tense with anticipation by the time they made it to the end of the block, turning to face Jonah with his heart beating out of his chest. “I have to go. For real this time. Be safe, okay? Don’t hang around witch territory too long.”

If Jonah had had a heart that actually, truly, worked, it would have skipped a half dozen beats when Owen said that he was offering to make the ring, like that was some small thing to offer instead of the literal life changing thing it actually was. He’d never been more thankful that Owen couldn’t hear Jonah’s heart like Jonah could hear Owen’s. “I can be patient. I have all the time in the world,” he practically breathed out, afraid if he was too loud, it might ruin the moment and make Owen change his mind. “Besides, that just means I get to see you for longer and that’s more than a win in my book,” he admitted. If Owen was promising this huge thing, it meant he wasn’t going to just up and ghost Jonah. The longer it took, the more time Jonah could try to spend with the nerdy witch and that was almost as exciting as the thought of getting the sun back. Almost.  But to be fair, the sun had had longer to win Jonah over, it had had longer for Jonah to pine after it. He smiled softly when Owen said he wanted to be there the first time he used the ring, not doubting for a second that Owen was interested to make sure the thing worked, but also glad he backed up Jonah’s suspicion that maybe it was about a little more than that. “You can do or have whatever you want if you can make me that ring,” he said honestly. That was the sort of thing Jonah would never truly be able to repay him for. 

Jonah had never really been much of a handholder. It was such a weirdly intimate gesture and he’d never really seen the appeal of it. But now he couldn’t stop from wondering why he hadn’t tried it earlier. It felt amazing and warm and sensual - but maybe that was less about holding hands and more about it being Owen that he was holding hands with. He couldn’t help but grin at the groaned ‘stop’ from Owen and the sudden falter in his heartbeat. It was nice, being able to hear the effect he had on the other considering how cool he seemed to try to stay on the outside. He unlinked their fingers so that he could drag the tips of his own along the pulse point of Owen’s wrist, the rushing warmth of the flowing blood warming his own touch. This hadn’t been what he’d sought out for the evening, but this sudden connection he felt to this man was better than anything he could have hoped for for the evening. Even if things didn’t pan out, if Owen got home and decided a vampire wasn’t his style, at least Jonah had realized that maybe this was something he wanted, that not every connection had to be forged in death and control and abuse and blood. “Is it the magic? I thought only vampires got to be this supernaturally pretty,” he couldn’t help but muse. 

“A librarian kink? Is that even a thing?” he couldn’t help but ask with a laugh. “Oh, baby, I’d have had you pinned to the bar,” he teased playfully at the mention of elbow pads, moaning softly. He was joking, of course. He was pretty sure he’d never found elbow pads sexy, but there was a very good chance that Owen would be the one person on the planet who could pull the look off. It wasn’t really Jonah’s type, this whole bossy nerd vibe that Owen had going on, but that was one of the things that made all of this so much interesting. It wouldn’t have taken much to pick up some handsome human at the bar, but this? This was so much more fun and rewarding. There was a time and place for  cheap and fast to satisfy a surface itch, but this? This was satisfying something deep and visceral that Jonah hadn’t even realized was there.  He paused, thinking over the question about losing control with patients, knowing the answer Owen wanted, knowing the truth, and wondering how to satisfy both of those things. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I like a challenge,” he commented. Of course being constantly surrounded by blood wasn’t easy, but he’d worked hard to control himself, to get a system going. “Even the most noble of Physicians loses patients,” he added on. It was an Emergency Room, people died all the time. But he suspected that answer wasn’t going to be enough for Owen and instead of leaving blanks for Owen to incorrectly fill in himself, he expanded. “I’m better at keeping control than I used to be. I chose Emergency Medicine because if an extra liter of blood goes missing, no one’s going to measure what’s on the floor to make sure it adds up. It’s been a long time since I’ve lost control enough that I’ve killed someone. And when it does happen, I always have the bags ready for a transfusion. Bagged blood is easier for their body to use than it is for mine,” he said, keeping his voice low so that no one else could overhear what he was saying. He hoped there was enough white in the grey area that Jonah had just presented that Owen didn’t write him off instantly. 

“An underwater city?” he repeated. “I thought those were only in movies,” he added on, thinking about things like Atlantis that only existed in fantasies and stories. But here was Owen, saying he’d actually been to one. “I can’t imagine the things you must have seen in the world. Can’t believe you choose to set roots in this place.” It wasn’t like this city had anything going for it, not like some underwater city or historical ruin would. “I guess,” he shrugged when Owen asked if the bond with his Sire was a chemical thing. Jonah didn’t really know the mechanism through which it happened, and he didn’t care enough to look into it. “It doesn’t block out the hate, though. The two things both take up residence, constantly at war. It’s hell,” he corrected. To have to stay with the person who killed you, who stole everything from you, was one thing. To then be forced to care deeply for them? It was a new kind of hell, one that had made Jonah wish for actual hell on more than one occasion. But any suicide attempts he’d made had quickly been thwarted by his sire - fucking bond. Jonah nodded when Owen gave a little more detail about how magic and the specialities worked and he wondered what Owen had chosen for himself and where his natural talents fell. “Are the more natural talents passed down through families?” he asked, suddenly desperately curious as to how genetics worked and were altered when magic was involved. 

He held his hand out for the other and while he waited nervously to be turned down again, it reminded him of a scene from a Disney movie. Out of the two of them, Jonah was definitely the street rat to Owen’s independent Princess and he couldn’t help but smile softly at the thought. Idiot. He let out a breath he hadn’t needed to hold or even take when Owen finally agreed and took Jonah’s hand and the other eagerly walked with him out towards the street, though he was sure to take his time with it. He only had until the end of the street and he didn’t want to rush getting there. But it came too soon and as Owen turned to face him, Jonah’s hands reached up to grasp Owen’s face before pulling him in for an almost desperate kiss. If holding Owen’s hand made Jonah feel warm, his lips sliding against the other practically set him on fire and he pushed in closer, wanting to absorb as much of this moment as inhumanly possible. When he finally did pull back, he was grinning like an idiot. He’d never had much of a poker face. “Promise I’m going to see you again? Without me having to track you down,” he said, hoping that Owen wasn’t going to go home and somehow talk himself out of wanting to see Jonah. If it happened, Jonah could find him easily enough, but he wanted this to be something Owen wanted too. 

[kaikhaos]

The Hurricane Sandy Saga Continues…

So here’s the story of my life since October 28, 2012 and all the chaos that has come with it. This is not a happy story, so far, but I’m hoping you guys can help make it one, or at least help prevent a bad end. This is a story of corrupt banks, government bullsh*t, and a 25 year old disabled trans queer who just wants to go home. Over the next five thousand words, I hope you realize the extent of how life has repeatedly NOPED at any sense of logic. At the end of my story, I’m going to ask you to help me out if you can and to spread the word either way.

The tl;dr version is that my family is facing homelessness for the fourth time in eighteen months and I really need you guys’ help to get us back into a stable situation so this never happens again. The mortgage company has screwed us yet again and is holding on to $250,000 that is supposed to be ours. So while we own one house and one newly demolished lot, we have nowhere to live. If you can at all help out, please do. My paypal link is here: http://paypal.me/mihaelkai .

My name is Aleks. This is my story.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m disabled. I have been legally recognized as disabled since I was 18. I have a combination of mental health issues and physical health issues that make it so my capacity on any given day varies greatly from “I made it through a day at a con thanks to lots of painkillers!” to “I brushed my teeth today and didn’t cry doing it!” But I try. Anxiety, depression, C-PTSD, & ADD are just a few of the things I’ve been diagnosed with by my therapist and psychiatrist, paired with diagnoses from my doctors of migraines, fibromyalgia, and a degenerative connective tissue disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos that all combine to leave me in fairly constant pain basically everywhere. My brain and my body attack me constantly but I still try to do what I can. Unfortunately, it means I can’t just go out and get a 9-5 or retail job to help fix my situation. I can only do what I can do and I have to know my limits.

I live with my mother and my QPP Luca who are both also disabled.

You may know in 2012 we were hit by Hurricane Sandy. If you don’t know that, you’re about to find out. We had six feet of water in our house and my grandfather’s house next door (AKA: my inheritance) floated off of its foundation and was straight up condemned. Ever since then, life has been, in a word, chaos. It’s gotten to be a theme in our house that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. Even my therapist has given up on making any kind of treatment plan and is basically just focusing on damage control. And honestly, at this point, I just wanna go home.

But Aleks, it’s been seven years, why aren’t you home yet? Oh boy, I am SO glad you asked. Let’s get into this history.

First, a prequel. I’m not rich, my family isn’t rich, but we get by. Our house wasn’t big, but it was beautiful. In 2006, my mother bought two tiny houses next door to each other from an old man who wanted to sell them to a family the way he’d grown up in the smaller house while his parents lived in the other house. The one house was a six hundred square foot bungalow that would become my grandfather’s and its neighbor was a seven hundred square foot house that would become mine and my mother’s.

Our house was gorgeous and cute. Built in the early 1900s by a tinsmith with scraps from all of his jobs, all of the walls were tin instead of sheetrock or plaster, the floors were gorgeous hardwood, and the three bedrooms were each under a hundred square feet. It was tiny but it was ours.

On August 28th, 2011, that house was hit by Tropical Storm Irene. Our house was flooded by two feet of water on the first floor. The Atlantic Ocean took out our floors, cabinets, appliances, electrical outlets, the bathroom tile, and the furniture, not to mention rusting the heck out of the bottom of the tin walls. It took six months to get the final eighty thousand dollar settlement out of the insurance company.

The check was deposited by the mortgage company who said they would hold onto it and dole it out as we hired contractors or finished repairs. But here’s the thing: The settlement barely covered enough for the supplies, so we maxed out credit cards and depleted personal savings and finished our repairs a few months later with the help of very few contractors and a lot of DIY.

We installed our kitchen appliances as the last step and called the mortgage company that day to ask them to come and inspect and verify the repairs were done so they could release the other seventy thousand dollars that they were holding onto. They said they were backed up and that they would come and inspect in a month.

Our new stove was 22 days old when Hurricane Sandy hit us.

Where Irene was manageable, Sandy was devastating. My grandfather’s house floated on the storm surge and landed three feet away from its foundation. The legs of our lawn table were bent and sticking out from under the house like the damn wicked witch or something. Our house on the other hand shifted by an inch. Not much, you’d think, but enough to break every pipe in the house and damage the entire structural stability of the house.

The town building department condemned my grandfather’s house and wrote ours up as “more than 50% damaged”.

Needless to say, both houses were left completely and totally uninhabitable.

The mortgage company inspector came and said because everything was wet and ruined that they “couldn’t certify the repairs were completed” even when we were standing there with a stack of receipts and before and after pictures, clearly proving everything had been replaced since most of the materials had been changed. So they decided they wouldn’t release the $70,000 they were holding onto from Irene until the new SANDY repairs were done. Even though we’d already spent that money on repairs and run up debt because of it, they decided they were just going to hold onto it for longer.

And honestly? Fuck those guys. They are the root of some of the most evil parts of this, as you’ll see.

So back to the Sandy damages. First, the insurance company offered us a FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLAR damage assessment. Fifteen thousand bucks when we had six feet of water in our house. For perspective, fourteen months before Hurricane Sandy, Tropical Storm Irene sent 24 inches of water into our house and the insurance company gave us eighty thousand dollars to make those repairs. So yeah, fifteen thousand wasn’t gonna do it. The construction estimates for the repairs were coming in around two hundred and fifty thousand.

So, of course, we appealed. Our engineer said parts of the house were outright dangerous from the damage and had to be torn down and replaced. We told the insurance company this and they told us they would send their own engineer. And… well… they sent SOMEBODY. Was that guy a licensed engineer? Nope. Did they tell us he was? Yup.

So then we appealed to FEMA. The judge from FEMA told them outright to send a LICENSED engineer in his decision and left it at that. So then they did. This guy now said he thought fifty thousand was gonna do it. The insurance company looked at his report and went “mmm… so how about thirty thousand?”

So… no. So then we had to hire a lawyer and took them to court. We weren’t the only ones, thousands of people had to file these lawsuits. The lawyer told us not to let the mortgage company cash the $30,000 of checks we’d been given for the storm so far because it could be argued to be us agreeing to that number. He said we just had to WAIT. So the checks got too old to cash.

The Visiting Nurse Service started sending a therapist to our house once a week for each of the three of us to help with “Hurricane-Related PTSD”. Yup. Cool. On top of my regular C-PTSD. Awesome. But the guy was nice and having therapists to talk to twice a week (my regular one and this guy) was helpful. And he gave me some worksheets that helped me kind of have more of a tool kit. Everything still sucked but hey, we all trudged on.

Pretty sure this was around when the first roofing shingles started falling off of our rental house. We told the landlord that this was a problem and that the property was going to start getting leaks in the roof. We pointed out that it said in our lease that he was supposed to fix this little ‘issue’.

Repeatedly.

Including in writing and by sending him photos of the slowly growing stack of shingles that were not on the roof anymore and the leaky window.

And he still did diddly squat about it.

For five years.

Meanwhile during this whole… process, New York State started the New York Rising program to help rebuild the houses who were tied up in lawsuits like ours or who didn’t have insurance like my grandfather’s. We applied right away. It seemed like an answer!

…So then uh… New York Rising LOST our file.

…Uh… Twice.

And when they finally DID decide to properly process our application, they gave us a grand total of $88,000 and put us in the ‘Build a whole new house’ category. Our house is, as I said, under 900 square feet in size. You literally cannot build a house in our area for that price at that size. Especially when it’s a property that needs 14 foot deep helical pilings and a nine foot high foundation to comply with current code. The foundation alone is $50,000. The lowest estimate we found from any construction company after no less than TEN bids was $180,000 NOT counting the architect who’s another $15,000. NY Rising expected us to be able to rebuild for a fraction of that. So we started looking into finding other financing possibilities while waiting on the lawsuit to continue going through.

We decided to hire our neighbour’s architect because he was something resembling almost affordable. We gave him a deposit. …A few weeks later, he had a heart attack while leaving the building department’s office. …A few weeks after that, he started being investigated for embezzling money from his clients.

At this point, we’d been out of our house for years. And more and more shingles kept falling off of the roof of the rental. Then a siding tile fell off too because the landlord’s son’s landscaping company crashed a lawnmower into it.

We started looking at houses to buy so that at least we would own something.

Then my grandfather (who had been a major contributor to our household finances) had a severe stroke. Six months later, he died. Suddenly we were $3,000 tighter per month. The possibility of buying a house went out the window. But we made do as best as we could.

FEMA was paying for the rental house we were living in while going through all of the appeal and lawsuit procedures and, when we hit their funding cap, New York Rising’s IMA program stepped in to pay “whichever is less, your rent or mortgage”. It still meant higher costs as the rent around here is more than our mortgage, but it made it so we could get by.

The one silver lining was that once my grandfather was out of the picture (since he’d been living with us in a shared rental since Sandy), I was able to start on testosterone injections. January 28, 2015, I was able to start my injections and officially begin the medical side of my transition.

Then New York Rising hit a cap on IMA funding. Which… sucked pretty fucking hard because then there was a few thousand a month more money we had to find to shell out. But then the program was extended and that was awesome.

Then our cat, Pickles, developed severe kidney problems. She was my best friend since the day she showed up on our doorstep a week after we bought our house in 2006 and wandered into the kitchen demanding petting. She moved into our lives and never left. I couldn’t give her up without a fight. So I spent all of my savings on her medical bills and started giving her saline injections twice a day every day to help her kidneys flush the toxins they couldn’t handle themselves.

Then the IMA ran out again. So back to the land of suck. They told us we would be eligible for a little more funding. But only if we demolished the existing house.

In order to legally demolish the house, we had to pay for a construction company to do it under their license. New York Rising expected us to be able to demo the house for $5,000. The lowest bid we received was for $9,000. When we told them this, their reaction was essentially “yeah, yeah, we know, just make it work”. Make it work is a cool and funny phrase when spoken by an aging fashion consultant on television. It’s not so cool or funny when it’s being told to you by the people who are supposed to help you fix your house. It is stressful as hell.

Then Pickles got sicker. And sicker. And her at-home dialysis wasn’t enough to keep her going anymore. Pickles passed in May 2016.

In 2017, we finally won our lawsuit. The judge ruled the insurance company had to release a full payment to the policy maximum of $250,000! Those jerks tried giving us $15,000 and the judge was like “Uh… no, this is $250,000 of damage”. Victory! But we were still out our legal fees because, unlike homeowner’s insurance where the insurance company pays the fees, flood insurance is federally underwritten so you’re not allowed to get the legal fees paid for. Some flood insurance companies realized they’d fucked up and as a result agreed to pay for the legal fees. Our flood insurance company… wasn’t so generous. But a check was still generated by the flood insurance company thanks to the judge. Huzzah, light at the end of the tunnel!

…Then the lawyer refused to sign the check.

Apparently our lawyer has had dealings with our mortgage company before and run into the same problem as we had with their “we’ll release your funding at the end” theory. Except for him that meant “we won’t pay out your legal fees until the house is finished” and he didn’t like that. So they wanted him to sign the check over to them and he wanted them to sign the check over to him. They spent years arguing over a piece of paper with some dollar signs on it while we got needlessly further into debt.

Then one of my ferrets, Wasabi, my emotional support animal, got really sick really suddenly.

By the time the vet scrambled to find out what was wrong, it was too late and he was gone. It turned out that he had a rare autoimmune condition caused by heavy metal exposure from the water. His sister survived, but now Lemon was alone and she and I were both devastated. Watching the way she would get excited and then sad any time we brought out a toy with Wasabi’s scent on it broke my heart so I replaced her toys.

A month later, people came knocking on our door offering free water filters if they would let us track the toxic plume of decades old industrial chemicals and waste spreading unhindered through the groundwater supply that had apparently reached us and was contaminating our pipes.

Eventually, during all this, New York Rising started to realize that their $160 per square foot amount just wasn’t enough when it came to houses like ours. So they started a program called the Recon 100 program. The goal of this program was supposed to be that New York Rising would take over the build process, they would hire contractors and architects in bulk, essentially hiring them for ‘bundles’ of 10 or 20 properties at a time to get them to accept a lower profit per house because they would be guaranteed months of solid work. We were signed up into the program.

Now, as a condition of this program, we had to stop doing any work on our own, we’d have to return whatever hadn’t been spent on repairs already, and we’d have to give them any insurance checks. But New York Rising was bragging about how they had programs that would allow you to repay the funding over several years because they knew everyone was using a little bit here or there to make ends meet. And that was all well and dandy because once the repairs were done, the mortgage company would release what they were holding one way or another. They would have to. …Right?

Meanwhile, our rental assistance hit the next cap. New York Rising told us not to worry because once this paperwork was approved, we’d be eligible for a higher cap of extended rental assistance. It was just a matter of waiting for the paperwork to get approved, they said.

Then our caseworker at New York Rising decided she was going to deny our receipts for the funds already spent. And that she wasn’t going to file the appeals to that denial that we explicitly asked her in writing to file.

Then on top of that, we discovered that at some point our NYR caseworker had decided to NOT sign us up for the extended timeline repayment thing because… fuck knows why, honestly? And that now she wasn’t going to apply us for it because “oh it’s full now”. So NY Rising decided that, before they’d do anything, they wanted us to give THEM the money that was still sitting in those pre-lawsuit paper checks that went old immediately. The government decided that we either had to magic the money of an un-cashed check out of thin air or else it was up to us to: 1, get them reissued, 2, get them deposited by the mortgage company, and 3, somehow get the mortgage company to issue that money to New York Rising.

And they wanted all this done in less than a week because they decided this in the last phase of our approval process and there were other deadlines really close. …Needless to say, the mortgage company was like “lol um nah” even to the theoretical idea of giving the money to NY Rising for the repairs, nevermind the hassle of getting the checks reissued by the flood insurance company with an active lawsuit ongoing.

New York Rising only said “too bad, figure it out yourself and PS because you’re not in this program anymore, we won’t give you the continued rental assistance, why aren’t you done rebuilding your house yet?” Meanwhile, we were waiting on them for months because they told us it was just waiting for the paperwork to go through.

Meanwhile, we had a new jerk of a builder/flipper neighbour. He’d bought the house next door to us when the family with the new baby decided it wasn’t worth waiting so many years to have their own house fixed. Let’s call him Fish Head. He decided to have his building supplies delivered to our neighbour’s yard WITHOUT her permission because there wasn’t enough room on his property. Straight up, he had a whole pallet of building supplies just dumped on her yard. She complained, obviously, and her husband threatened to call the cops. So he moved his shit to to OUR yard because we happened to not be there that day. It took WEEKS to get him to move the shit, even WITH calling the cops.

Turns out, cops don’t give a shit if someone puts hundreds of pounds of building materials on your yard. They’ll tell you you’re well within your rights to move it yourself but if you don’t have a forklift or a whole team of burly humans to assist you in the move then too bad so sad.

Thanks, Fish Head.

But back to the housing. We were months overdue on the rent because we were “just waiting for the paperwork to finish processing”. They told us we’d get all the back stuff in one lump payment. They lied and now we were up shit’s creek.

Our scummy landlord finally sent a notice saying “I’ve waited long enough, get out”. So that was… cool. We were able to keep him from coming after the back rent by pointing out that he was a slum lord and that we’d notified him in writing about being a slumlord, but it still meant we had to move out immediately and in a rush. Thankfully, it was May.

So on June 1st 2018, we moved into our RV parked at a local campsite. Three adults, a cat, and a ferret, crammed into an RV that was anything but recreational.

We installed cameras on our house around this point because Fish Head kept having his workers trample all over our property and they kept breaking things and leaving garbage everywhere.

Then the engineer said he thought he could figure out a way to save the main body of our house and raise it, that we’d only have to demolish off the back room and possibly the bathroom in order to raise it. It was another light at the end of a repeatedly lengthening tunnel. So we changed tracks completely and had him start drafting stuff up for us to raise the existing house, rebuilding only the porch.

Now, here’s the thing about the local campsites, we don’t have many of them and they sell out pretty quickly. Especially for the height of the summer. So they didn’t have any of their ‘full hook-up’ sites, AKA the ones that get you electricity and everything, but we had water and a bathroom and a shower facility and the barbecue to cook food, and it was… survivable. Not exactly comfortable but survivable.

We started doing the work to repair the house instead of following the line of thinking of rebuilding it. We cashed in everything we could and scraped together every scrap of money we possibly could, we sold things, we asked for help where we could, we got a very understanding contractor to give us the lowest prices we could. We managed to get the mortgage company to pay out some of the Tropical Storm Irene money directly to the contractors. Remember that guy, wayyyy back in 2011? And the mortgage inspector who missed a pre-Sandy inspection by a week? Yeah. They still had that money. So even though it was technically Sandy damages as we’d already done the work from Irene, we managed to get them to pay that out. But WHATEVER. It got it paid.

We had a looming deadline from New York Rising that they wanted the house raised by December 31st. Or at least that they wanted it lifted and pending the new foundation. They call this ‘cribbing’ and it basically means your house goes up on Jenga Towers and that you can’t live in it for a while until the foundation is done and it goes back down. So we had to somehow make that happen. But first things first, the campground was closing for the season and we had to have a place to live.

On November 1st 2018, we were able to move back into our house.

Temporarily, at least, while permits and construction drawings and everything went through for getting the house raised.

So we applied to the mortgage company to get the remaining $40,000 that they had from Tropical Storm Irene, the full final payout. And, amazingly, we got it. In it came and went right back out it went to the contractors who were supposed to be working on raising the house because that December 31st deadline was still looming.

Then Fish Head who we keep running into issues with, FINALLY got a stop work order on his house for not having the right permits. Serves you right, Fish Head. But, in retaliation, he decided to lie to the building department that we were living there without utilities? Somehow? When we literally had all our utilities? And had gotten the “90% complete” inspection from our mortgage company? So THAT was a whole mess to try to straighten out. When we met with the head of the building department, he literally turned to the guy next to him and said “See, remember I told you about this guy? This is the retaliation I was telling you about” because he was the guy who had personally signed the stop work order on Fish Head.

So the next big concern was that December 31st deadline. Everyone kept debating whether or not New York Rising would extend it at the last minute again (as they’d done that once before), and we started scrambling to try to find somewhere to live while the house was raised. Ideally, we were looking for somewhere that WASN’T the cold tiny RV in the middle of a New York winter. We applied to a few apartments but because we were paying the mortgage and everything our debt to income ratio didn’t qualify.

On December 24th, 2018, we got the $250,000 check from the flood insurance company with our name and the mortgage company’s name. It seemed like a Christmas Miracle. So we immediately sent it over to the mortgage company so they could cash it and we could apply to have those funds released, remember, our house was FINISHED and HABITABLE, except for needing to be raised per the new flood zoning stuff. At the very least, we had the 90% inspection, and on our next inspection we got a 99%.

So we immediately started applying for the final permits for getting the house raised and my grandfather’s house demolished. The lady at the building department is… nice but not very organized. So we had to deal with the town jerking us around with the permits taking forever to get done, well past the time estimates they tell you on the phone when you call and ask about time estimates.

We rushed to have our disconnects done. Water, electric, sewer. The house was all wrapped up in a pretty bow ready to be raised. We moved into a hotel. All we needed was the final elevation permit and the money from the mortgage company.

So back to the mortgage company and that $250,000. The mortgage company denied the payout 3 times saying, “Oh we don’t have… this paper or that paper” for papers we had confirmation they had. The guy on the phone one time when we were like “….We submitted that one on x date while speaking to Z employee”, he tried saying, “Oh this fax isn’t legible…” and we were just like “…FAX… you mean the scanned in PDF we submitted via your web upload?” And he was like “…Oh. hold please…” and suddenly he could read the form. Magic. So basically they were just LYING to us. Why? Fuck knows.

Then it was, “Everything is fine and it’ll be issued in 3 days” on the 23rd. And we got the elevation permit! And the demo permit on my grandfather’s house! Everything was rolling along and it was all going to be fine! Right?

Not so fast.

On the 31st we still had no check. We called and it was, “Oh it has to go to this other department because it’s over $70,000, but everything is approved and they’ll issue the check in 5 to 7 days, HONEST”.

We called back on the 5th and THAT lie had turned into “Oh well… we sold your loan effective the 4th, you’ll have to ask the new guys”. The mortgage company SOLD OUR LOAN to another company WHILE our payout was “APPROVED AND SENT TO THE CHECK ISSUING DEPARTMENT”.

We called the new guys who told us, “Oh we don’t even have a ID NUMBER assigned for your loan yet, call back in a week to get your loan number and then it’s another week until we can even see your funds and start your payout claim oh and we probably need to schedule our own inspection.”

So it’ll be easily a month OR MORE before we get the money.

We are trying to expedite this whole process as best as we can. We managed to get the ID number in only 4 days. They seem to be arguing with themselves about whether or not they need a whole new inspection or not.

Meanwhile, we only really had the money for the hotel for the lift time but all the disconnects have been done (there is no heat, water, or electricity) so it’s not like we can just go BACK HOME during the delay either.

We have $250,000 on the way and we’re about to be homeless. Again. For the third time in 18 months.

If we can just get $5,000, we can pay to have the house RECONNECTED AGAIN to everything so we can wait these fuckers out and get the payout.

Every little bit helps.

Please.

The other option is living in the RV again just to have a roof over our heads. But unlike last time when it was warm, it is February and we are in NY. It snowed yesterday. RVs aren’t designed to keep warm when there’s snow out.

Please help me and my family stay in a house.

My paypal link is here: http://paypal.me/mihaelkai .

I am also taking a limited number of 1000 word or less commissions! That’s about the limit of what I can handle committing to right now! DM me for details!

(Mutuals/Friends: If you can’t donate but you can loan us some for two months or so, we can pay you back as soon as we get that check? Please let me know if it is a donation or if you would like to be paid back so I can keep a record.)

#transcrowdfund #trans crowd fund #please help #please consider donating #donation #donations

[mynameisdreartblog]

Cars

Aries: Porsche 959. Your textbook holds a secret lore beneath it. Yes, we’re the same research team from before, and we’ve hypothesized many scenarios for what could lie in there: Some of the staff on our team said it could’ve been about cyclopean cities, others said it was about concentric spheres deep underground… You know, very stale things. Indecisive has been the continuous mood, and that means we’re all still perplexed about what the strange text in the book means. Cú thought it was part of a larger algebraic formula, but he wasn’t meant to be trusted on the mathematical aspects of it to begin with. What’s normal, now, is the continual and nearly episodic reveal of the plot’s elements through incredibly traumatic revelations. Last week’s reveal consisted of rapid, passing images of the fidget toy: It appears to have not let go of us. [,] «Um, this is supposed to be the help desk; I came here to have my computer repaired and receive my restored textbook, but you are still keeping it here. What gives?» Well, we’ve been having, erm, some difficulty with cleaning it out: That cookie dough residue is quite “on there” as you’d say. «Yes, but I’ve been showing up to class for the past week unable to participate because I don’t have my textbook, and the teacher’s too much of a cheapskate to buy another €85, so I’d like it if you worked with me.» [,] You’re getting all semantic with us, and that’s dangerous to research operations. Please, do not continue to interfere with research: It’s vital that we prevent the events of the last experiment. «I already know what’s gonna happen at the end of it. You think you’re onto something, but you’re just puffing air. I’ll give you all the details you need if it gets me my textbook back.» Shh, stop it, you’re gonna spoil the ending for us! Cú may be suffering from black liquid oozing out his nostrils and loss of acute site, but he’s nearly there! Stop spoiling it with your insight! «I can look in there, and he is spasming on the floor.» Stop halting our research, you punk!

Gemini: 2003 Honda Civic. I am 27-years-old and I have never learned how to drive a car. Now, I’ve learned to drive a motorcycle because that’s a necessity if you’re living in Southeast Asia, but I and many others never saw the appeal of being able to drive cars in an environment wholly unsuited for them. But, all of that’s going to change to day because I have clients who tell me the only possible way to access their homes (and their mailboxes) is by car. I tried arguing with this guy on the phone the other day, and I brought up over and over that I could probably make it just fine to his location with motorcycle, but no; he kept insisting that I go by car exclusively. I was gonna be way more frustrated with this person, but since I had a week off, I figured I could budge in room for driving classes to accommodate the demands of these, let’s say, peculiar clients… «Yeah, you better learn how! Otherwise, I’ll lay a curse on you, ignorant fool!» Agh! «Truce, is he still on the phone with you?» Shh, yes? I’m still on the phone, Panji; please be patient. <Truce unmutes the phone call, continues the conversation, and stops the motorcycle in front of the driving academy. They and Panji exit the bike and walk into the driving academy.> […] «You know, you could’ve just told him to fuck off and you likely would’ve been just fine; I doubt the power that some rando has to affect your livelihood.» Of course, but I live by stigma, and one of them is where I can’t feasibly answer “fuck off” to any calls I receive with someone on the line: It has to be a line where no-one has answered. «This is why people complain about terrible cooperation, Truce.» [,] Cool, we're gonna be watching traumatic accident footage for the first half of the day. I heard there's real brains on the floor and an actual beating heart from the teen next to me! «Wait, they show us the dangers of car accidents before teaching us the basics? What kinda driving school is this?» A good one, Punji. The half of my brain controlled by the spirit will be intrigued by the violence before we get into any of the boring stuff. If it works for me, then it works for every other slightly older person here.

Scorpio: Ford GT40. «The poorly-lit classroom you never go into… Uh, it’s there. Like, I don’t know what else to say about it other than that it’s poorly-lit and that I have the potential to ascribe some paranormal properties to it, but I just don’t feel like it, you know? There’s so many poorly-lit classrooms here because it’s a school on Independence Movement Day (you’d know that if you paid attention to the calendar), and I’m here way past normal school hours too. I’d be arrested for trespassing if it weren’t for the fact that I need to be here because my parents were called for a parent-teacher meeting: They wanna talk about “academic performance” and “behavior” and “mental health” but those are all frivolous concepts. There you have it, there’s nothing more for me to say about these rooms. I’ll consciously position myself to wander around these premises unsupervised while my parents fill out miles of paperwork. I’ll do the received action of going to the playground just a couple of yards ahead from my current position. I’m being rebellious and emphasizing the room.» […] Can I just scrap this one? I feel bad for cutting it off, but I can't create anything outta this and it's just gonna go down as one of those desperate, 4th-wall-breaking horoscopes that doesn't even try to be clever. Why did I even write this? It's already adding to the long list of subjects involving school that make it way too obvious what position we're writing from. I should go back to writing about ants instead; that was more fun. [,] Dammit, Lis, your apathy is rubbing off on me and it's degrading my work ethic! I’m the one who fulfills all of the papers you leave for me under my door, and you can live your life like normal while pretending that a disfigured shambler doesn’t live with you. [,] I hate characters that ask a different question every twenty seconds too, Lis, but I still need to add character development — no, it is crucial — after a series of schizophrenic soul-searching. <Juyeon wanders in the midst of a story that hasn’t been written yet, all while the Prophet argues with Lisette’s rationality.> «I… I want some pickle juice.» Yes, it’s important to the plot of the horoscope, Lis!

Capricorn: 1963 Corvette Stingray. Man, wouldn't it suck to be a privateer in the year 1778? I mean, you know I don’t like telling the stories of promptly political white men, but we’re not talking about aristocratic standards, we’re talking about dockman standards. And a dockman’s standards for living in the 18th century were less than subpar. This was back when I could look at a satellite map encompassing the area between Halifax and Ontario and see how it wasn’t the eyesoar that it is now. [,] Man, imagine being one of the first people to see a satellite image of a territory; you’d shit your pants and recognize just how weirdly land is shaped. Yeah, as I was saying, this takes place even before the Halifax Explosion, and in this historical scenario — alright, yeah? — You’d be looking work, right? You’re down on your knees, your father just died of tetanus, and you’re barely managing an income from consistent begging. Then, — all of the sudden, right? — you’re approached by this guy named Elcid Barrett, and he’s asking of you to enlist on his voyage towards Jamaica to sabotage an American ship that’s filled with loads of stolen, Yankee gold. He’s looking for people like you — get this, right? — because of your experience from fishing beforehand. [,] Later, you find yourself with the rest of the men that Elcid hired, and you finally see the vessel you’ll live in: It’s decrepit, sickened, and all around horrid. It’s called the Antelope (quite a typical name for a vessel), and you’re now fully committed to do anything to escape the usual poverty of your situation. […] After a bunch of crap happens related to arguing with strange crew members, you finally spot an American vessel on your voyage to Jamaica, and Elcid orders you to turn the ship and follow the path of the Yankee vessel, but because the ship is such a hunk of junk, it takes you nearly two days to catch up to the ship. And, when you finally get there, do you know what’s the first thing that greets you? A cannonball straight into your mainmast. [,] Fast-forward and Elcid was blown off the damn ship, now your crew is leaderless and the poor vessel is getting worse, then BLAM! Both of your legs got blown off, and now it’ll take you six or nine years to get back to Halifax. […] Now, I hope most of you were taking notes, because I won’t repeat myself and I won’t be offering a PDF of that story; just find it on Google.

#Zodiaccupuncture #Zodipunc #Aries #Gemini #Scorpio #Capricorn

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

As one of the people who saw Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern in theaters, I felt like it really was not as bad as the reputation it’s earned.  It wasn’t good.  It made a lot of dumb mistakes in terms of effects and set-pieces. But like, in terms of Ryan Reynolds’s oeuvre, it’s not even in the top ten worst things he’s been in.  It’s not even the worst superhero movie he’s been in--Origins was fucking awful.  So I gave Green Lantern another shot, and I’m watching it, and again--not good, but not the worst thing ever.  Certainly not bad enough to be held against any of the people in it.

The thing about it, mostly, is that nobody behind the camera had bothered to watch Blade.

Blade, in case you don’t know, came out in 199-fucking-8.  It was The Matrix, but with vampires, except The Matrix* wouldn’t be out for another year.  You’d have to say The Matrix was like Blade, if it was for that guy who wouldn’t shut up about Buddhism and shrooms in your Philosophy 101 class instead of goths.

Blade was a superhero movie, except the readily-identifiable comic book-based superhero movies from the previous decade were... not great.  The Batman franchise had gone off the rails in a serious way. Barb Wire was a Catwoman for the ‘90s. Spawn was shockingly bad.  The superhero movies that weren’t straight up cinematic failures tended to be comedies--Orgazmo, Blankman, Meteor Man, The Mask--of varying degrees of success and with release levels that ranged from limited to general, but which nobody was expected to take seriously.

Vampire movies were kind of in the same boat.  Buffy (the series) had only started hitting its stride the year before.  Bram Stoker’s Dracula was good, but popular audiences didn’t really seem to get it.  Most of the other recent entries were either sleazy pulp nobody expected anything from or lazy comedies.

Blade had pretty much everything stacked against it, in terms of audience expectation, marketing, etc.  Even with Wesley Snipes attached, it’s a miracle it got green-lit, given the lack of widespread audience for the comic book and the niche appeal.  It proceeded to kick the goddamn doors off audience expectations.

There’s a needle people think you have to thread with movies based on established properties.  Keep too much of the property’s original-format mythology, and you risk alienating neophytes who can’t follow it or are flat weirded out by it.  Throw too much out, though, and you risk alienating the diehard fans whose guaranteed ticket sales got you through studio’s door in the first place.  It’s not entirely untrue, but it turns out you can have your cake and eat it too if you start with a barely-explained off the goddamned chain set-piece right out of the gate.

Blade’s backstory is teased by a minute-long scene of his mother dying in childbirth while being treated for what is clearly a vampire bite.  We don’t really have to care about it at this point, though, because we immediately segue into a trashy couple making out and nyooming around in a sports car and then gaining admittance to an underground rave in the basement of a meat-packing plant.  It’s exciting and sexy enough to keep the audience engaged, it’s generous with the horror-movie cues, and you’re primed to expect something interesting to happen any second now.

Which is when the sprinkler heads start spraying blood everywhere, the male half of the trashy couple turns out to be the only human in the room, and then Blade shows up.

“The Daywalker!” somebody gasps.

Do we have to care what this means?  No, we do not, because Blade immediately starts fighting everybody in the place.  Turns out you don’t need expensive monster make-up when you can just douse somebody in two buckets of fake blood, tell them to give the camera crazy-eyes, and then rush at Wesley Snipes hissing and baring a pair of fanged dentures.  It’s over the top in the best possible fucking way.

For those of your playing along at home, by the time we’re ten minutes into the film, we know that vampires are common, brazen, violent hedonists who have their own language and enclaves, that they burst into flame in a really cool way when they die, and that Wesley Snipes can kill the absolute shit out of them because he’s got superpowers.  We did not actually need to be told any of this, and we didn’t notice that we were learning it because it’s happening around a straight bitchin’ action sequence.

Do we get exposition dumps?  Of course.  Do we get lots of scenes designed to appeal to the V:tM crowd?  Oh heeeeeell yes.  Is it all shot with the lurking conviction that any second now, another absolutely tits-out fight is going to happen?  Also hell yes.  If you make something sleek enough, cast charismatic actors, and heavily imply that the action’s gonna start back up any second, people really do not care how much bullshit mythos you’re shoving at them.

Blade provided a ready-made and very, very good template for every superhero movie to come after it, especially the ones based on pre-existing properties.  If you hook the audience in the first fifteen minutes and keep that tension going, if you cast people who are 110% committed to selling everything the film brings to the table, you can throw in whatever dumbass bullshit you want in between doses of well-staged action and scenery chewing.  Blade was a fucking master class in getting the audience to follow you down a rabbit hole.

It’s twenty years old, and there’s a lot about it that’s dated--the cinematography especially has a lot of MTV-inflected, heavy-handed and hamfisted 90s flourishes that directors fortunately grew out of in favor of new and different heavy-handed and hamfisted flourishes--but the basic beats and rhythm of the film are as solid now as they were when it came out.  It helps that a lot of the characterization and plot are a straightforward, common trope, except that they’re not offered in a way that feels insulting or lazy.  Those never really go out of style, so long as they’re not presented badly. 

And thanks to Blade, every serious-business superhero movie that came out after, say, 2000 has absolutely no excuse for frontloading confusing, boring, garbagey exposition and shitty, cliched character-building.  Just look at a scene and go, “How would Blade handle this?” and then do that. 

If you can’t manage that, then go, “How would Fifth Element handle this?” and then do something really fucking weird and offer zero further explanation for it.  Look the audience in the eye and dare them to keep up.  Like, I don’t fucking know, man.  Blade’s not a complicated film, if you can’t manage to learn its lessons as a professional filmmaker, maybe hit the books until you can be trusted with millions of dollars?

*Not to be all like “Oooooh, The Matrix,” but it’s really, really difficult to overestimate how many doors The Matrix opened for movies that could be described as “The Matrix, but with ______” on account of how desperate studios were to replicate that box office success.  They bankrolled a lot of movies on the gamble of seeing that kind of return, and audiences who’d gotten used to being handed garbage without a reliable way to pre-filter (Google dropped in ‘97, kids) were easier to entice with the promise of that sort of viewing experience.

#in case anybody was wondering #green lantern is like opposite-Blade

[groundramon]

Homph I finished tri and I wrote down my thoughts as I was watching because I had too many funny shitposts and nobody to share them with bc charlie hasn’t watched tri yet

PS i wont be reblogging tri spoilers (besides MINOR stuff like, digivolutions of already confirmed digivolution lines or non-spoilery shitposts, but I’ll try to tag shitposts as #tri spoilers anyways [digivolutions specific to tri ill tag as well but not ones that were already basically confirmed]) for a while so ur safe here!  I’m just gonna like everything/most things because then I can rb em to hisyaryumon lmao (also u should check out hisyaryumon....its me n charlie’s digimon blog)

EP 1:

- ok. alright. ok. good. they’re dealing with kari’s emotions now instead of just. nothing.  ok. alright. cool.  Still dont like how obscure/”artsy” they’re being with it, this is digimon not kagerou project, but ok.

- Also. I stand by tk and kari being one of the few good straight ships in digimon.  just saying.

- kari: this is my fault... me: god damn it shut up you little brat also me: god relatable ALSO me: ill take whatever display of emotions i can get

- I love how nobody believes tai is dead like.  They’re upset and worried but they’re also like “nah. he cant be. that fucking asshole just left us in our time of need” (actually only matt is the last one)

- Gabumon i would die for you also im crying and I think that’s the first time tri managed to make me fucking CRY

EP 2:

- I had thoughts but then the 02 kids happened and I entered another plane of reality.  I don’t feel real right now

- the only one I can remember is evil!gennai being a dumbass and being like “SUFFER AND SQUIRM YOU PATHETIC HUMANS AS YOU FIGHT OVER THE LAST SEAT” 1. humans are KNOWN for their ability to care for others you dumb obvious fuck and 2. is. is the entire tube going? because that tube can fit too people if they squish.  This isn’t a joke I’m serious it can.

- oh yeah also when i saw whomstever the fuck his name is (adult guy who i love but fuck names) and he was all bloodied i was like “its a cold day in hell when i see blood in digimon” (I think there was blood in an earlier ep but shh idc)

EP 3:

- didn’t nishijima start off as a fucking life coach to these kids.  What the fuck he was supposed to help them find a career not emotionally scar them by bloodily dying in front of one of them

- im realizing that the reason hackmon was always in his cloak, in the shadows, standing still is that they cannot animate him in any normal position for the life of him.  I drew him with better anatomy when i was 14 and didn’t have a tablet.  No seriously, look:

I didn’t say it wasn’t bad, you guys are just underestimating how bad the anatomy on this poor creature is.  Why cant ppl draw dracomon or hackmon correctly imma cry

- ordinemon has the best reaction faces

the best part about these two screenshots is that they literally cut one to the other, first the first one to the second one and then it cuts back to the first one.  They were really proud of these stupid ass expressions.

- I started overcoming my dissociation shock from the second episode and my hypercritical mind was analyzing the shit out of everything that happened (it is Not happy) but then evil!gennai called kari and evil goddess and idk if he’s exaggerating to make her feel bad or if she’s literally a fucking god of chaos and destruction and either way im like

she did kinda like.  Watch wizardmon die, watch tai die, watch gatomon get absorbed.  The dark ocean is just a metaphor for depression and honestly if 02 wasn’t all over the fucking place I think Kari would’ve had some pretty decent development in it.  Actually you know what, I’m using that as an angle to approach Tri at now, wish me luck bc i might actually give it more leeway now

EP 4:

- I’m not dissociating but I forgot to say anything again and I already forgot what happened

- Cant believe mei is fucking dead

EP 5:

- I like to imagine that Tai got there like a few minutes ago, but he was like “well damn guess yall figured it out without me.  alright ill just. see if I need to do anything” and then meicoomon was Still Bad so he waited for when she struck just to make the most badass entrance possible.  Fucking extra ass bitch

- I forgot to write anything again but uhhh I wasn’t satisfied so anyways lets just get into the Juicy Details

Originally I was actually planning to be kinder to Tri than I expected.  Was very invested during it.  ‘Round the end of the last ep I realized hmmm no this isn’t working out.  Where are the 02 kids.  You should’ve brought them in to save the day.  That would’ve been SO cool and SO fun.  Fucking cowards.

god I’m kinda tired so I’m going to address a couple things I still had problems with, note that this isn’t everything it’s just everything I felt comfortable yelling about without rewatching past eps.  Like I forgot nishijima was all bloodied and presumably died in the last part until they brought it up and I was like “????” ALSO DID THE LADY WHO WAS HIS PARTNER OR W/E KILL HERSELF WITH THE GUN SHE FOUND, I JUST REALIZED LITERALLY AS I WAS TYPING THIS THAT SHE FOUND A GUN AND THEN I THINK IT CUT TO BLACK AND I’M

DID SHE FUCKING KILL HERSELF WHAT THE FUCK

anyways my problems:

1. They did joe. really dirty.  I’ll write a more proper rant on this sometime later (mostly bc charlie is MUCH better at talking about joe than I am) but basically I can tell you that his character development in the movies squandered his OG character development.  He’s basically an entirely different person.  Like Tri joe isn’t bad, besides being largely neglected (yes he has a whole half a movie to himself, no that doesn’t make up for it all), its just...not OG joe.  He’s a fine character just not the same character, and its NOT fine when you put the two together.

2. THEY DID THE 02 KIDS EVEN DIRTIER IM SO BITTER sorry you nostalgia-blind, money-hungry fucks at bandai, but the 02 cast is PART OF THE ADVENTURES UNIVERSE.  The only people who hate 02 are ones who like the characters but hate the mess of the storyline at the end, or are completely irrational and elitist about their love of the digimon series and would greatly re-evaluate their opinions if they watched the original series and 02 back to back.  They couldn’t even show them in some kind of group montage at the end??? Standing in the background when they call Mei???  Why couldn’t they call mei from a home phone also, but that’s a less important problem idc that much.  It was a cute scene besides the lack of 02 characters.  Whatever.  AND THE PROBLEM IS LIKE kari and tk?  This entire time???  Were like “oh they disappeared. oops” instead of being frantically searching for their lost friends???  Like i get tk and kari probably have fucking ptsd and can’t express any emotions because they watched important people die in front of their eyes at an incredibly young age but also 1. they didn’t address the ramifications of ptsd, so fuck that theory/excuse and 2. THAT??? WOULD ONLY MAKE THEM LOOK HARDER??? and put on a brave face as they look, but inside they’re so scared and so worried.  Not just “oh sweet, they were found/saved, theyre in the hospital but that’s fine” like WHAT theyre fucking assholes if that’s what they’d canonically do lmao.  God I am SO bitter over the ENTIRE thing with the 02 kids, it would’ve been BETTER if they were deleted from the fucking canon entirely.  Would I have still been bitter?  Yes.  But at least I wouldn’t be madder at TK and Kari too.

3. I stand 100% by the notion that Digimon is not and will never be cut out to be an adults’ franchise.  It wasn’t designed for adults, and it can’t be skewered towards adults.  These particular characters were designed for kids to relate to and find entertaining.  They do not work when placed into an adult setting.  Like, can you imagine a character like Ed from FMA going to the Digimon world?  I guess in a way that’s just Marcus but like.  Just imagine the FMA cast in Digimon Adventure.  It doesn’t work.  Digimon Tri is basically that except real.  Also Data Squad was darker than Adventure so my joke doesn’t even work.

I guess my primary point is that Tri isn’t mature enough of a setup for an adult audience.  It puts a focus on being “complex” and “philosophical” instead of working within Digimon’s constraints and making something good and adult out of that.  Like!  Digimon is a fucking TOY COMMERCIAL.  Don’t give me messages about the futility of human life.  I want bad puns and emotional characters.  That’s what Digimon has ALWAYS been, and ideally always will be.  Tri could’ve made itself more mature by dealing with the ramifications of the Digital World’s events, how it affected the kids psychologically and dealing with healing old scars.  It would’ve been a more mature take on a story we loved and would use things we loved about the story already - the fact that it took so much time exploring characters’ emotions and was surprisingly mature for the time - to make itself better.  You need to take the aspects that drew adults to the show and amplify them, not just slap on a complex story and unfunny dialogue and be like “oh this is fine, right?”

It’s not that Digimon can’t exist as an adult property, its just that if it repeats what Tri did, it’s got no merit and in my eyes the franchise is dead.  If it survives I guess I’ll be happy that people can still enjoy it but I find it unsustainable and unsatisfying to fans of the older series.  Tri is just a fuckfest of highly specific nostalgia that tries too hard to appeal to old fans without capturing what made the original series so magical, and in part thats because the original series WASN’T FOR ADULTS.  I don’t know about the Digimon Story games, bc they’re T-rated so perhaps they’re a better take on an adult Digimon story than Tri?  But you either need to make your own characters and lore specifically for an adult-oriented Digimon season, or perish.  Also, please make it a series and not a group of movies.  Getting four eps every 6-9 months was hell.

I stand by saying Appmon is a more faithful Digimon season than Tri to Digimon’s original spirit.  I believe it holds more potential for success than Tri and better embodies the spirit of the older Digimon seasons.  It’s dumb, its corny, it has horrible puns, but I LOVE it because it also has a deep dark story and emotional moments.  If you dislike Tri and you agree with things I said that make it unlikeable, I highly recommend giving Appmon a chance - if you watch a few episodes and think “oh yeah, I guess this is decent” you’re going to like it.  It’s everything Digimon has always been and hopefully always will be, just with a different concept.  And hopefully the end of the series doesn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth and I have to redact this statement haha since I’m not done with it yet, but I’ve heard good things about it so I’m hoping not so.

Overall, if you watch Tri, don’t get your hopes up.  It resolves everything okay-ish but it’s a pretty forgettable anime on its own and simply doesn’t work as part of the Digimon franchise.

I am, however, pretty interested in what evil!gennai said at the end about Diaboromon and Daemon.  It raises interesting questions about the timeline too.  We know Daemon is in the dark ocean, so perhaps that’s a hint at a future project?  (They did confirm a future project btw, in conjunction with tri being over)  But what about Diaboromon?  I dont believe that Our War Game (I think thats what its called?) took place after Tri, based on the outfits and ages and stuff, but I also don’t remember the movies that well.  Could Diaboromon still be out there too?  It’s interesting.

However, because of the lackluster performance of Tri, I don’t have my hopes up and I really hope that this “next project” goes in a different direction.  Although I guess if they include the 02 kids, I’ll be somewhat less salty...

Side note, did they ever explain why the gennais went evil?  Like ?  That’s a pretty important thing.  The gennais helped SAVE the human world in 02.  And I get that apparently Tri is ignoring 02′s ending but still.  It’s shitty, because Gennai was still a good guy in the original too (and also they cant just keep is younger look and act like 02 never happened)  MAYBE its something I missed but I dont think so.  God there’s just.  So much wrong with Tri.  I’m very displeased and very bitter and I wanna get back to Appmon asap.

It’s got good moments, its got bad moments, I dont know, I don’t care.  There’s nothing wrong with you if you like it, there’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t, and there’s nothing wrong with you if you flip flop and are split like me.  I just wish Tri fulfilled its potential instead of becoming a boring mess.

#stormy speaks #digimon

[rickandmortygetschwifty]

Re: simpler question. Morty accidentally ingests Rick's stash. His experience, fragmentary, somewhat hellish, somewhat sexy. As descriptive as you can get it!

I’m assuming by “Rick’s stash” you mean the K-Lax that you mentioned in a previous unpublished ask? Here it is! Drabble under the cut for possibly triggering content and mildly sexual themes:

The parties on Proxinius-A were legendary.

They were known throughout the whole galaxy as celebrationsthat invited catastrophes of epic proportions. Many of them ended in numerousaliens dying from overexhaustion, buildings being destroyed, and propertystolen from under their owners’ noses. Yet people still visited the planet,still drawn to it by the wild tales and rumors spun by those (un)lucky enoughto have been witness to one of the parties. History had been made onProxinius-A. The greatest musicians have written their number one hits here.Scientists have made breakthroughs on this planet. Even politicians have signedtreaties ending world wars during one of the countless parties being held.

Many of the planet’s locals have fled the planet as touristsslowly turned it into a haven of eternal raves. It truly was one of thecraziest, most dangerous hangouts in all of the galaxy. Most everyone with twobrain cells to rub together would steer clear of this place.

Everyone except Rick, that is. And he just dragged hisgrandson into the center of one of the wildest parties the planet had held inyears. The stadium holding the party was filled with thousands of aliens fromdifferent star systems, and there were scenes of mass chaos wherever Mortyturned. The sweaty crowd of aliens on the dance floor looked more like an angrymob that was ready to tear something limb from limb at the slightestprovocation.

Morty was not amused.

“C’mon, Morty! D-d-don’t be such a fucking wet blanket,”Rick complained, tugging Morty’s sleeve. “Stop standing in the corner a-a-and jointhe party.”

“I-I-I never wanted this in the first place, Rick! Thiswhole place smells like piss, a-a-and I think one of the aliens just felt me up—I-I’mjust not feeling it, okay? Why didn’t you tell me w-we were going to a planetlike this? I-I don’t feel safe!” Morty retorted. “I just want to go home!”

“Fuck, all you do is complain! W-w-why do I even bother withyou? Fine.” Rick let go of his grandson’s arm, plunging a hand down his insidecoat pocket. He pulled out a large vial filled with pink powder and spread itscontents into his palm. “Maybe some ground-up Kalaxian Crystals w-w-will makethis more bearable for you. Now w-w-will you stop yapping about going home?”

“Are you kidding me, Rick?” Morty said, eyeing the powder inRick’s palm. No way, no fucking way is he taking that alien drug. Who knowswhat the hell it’d do to him? “That-that stuff made you go nuts. Don’t y-y-youthink I don’t remember what happened at the party back in our house. Y-y-youcompletely trashed the house! I’m not going to—” Morty was interrupted by Rick’shand shoving the powder directly under his nose.  The boy coughed hard as he inhaled the particlesof the highly effective drug accidentally, the ground K-Lax crystals coatinghis nose with dust. He stumbled away from Rick as bright pink clouds of dust eruptedfrom his mouth with every hacking cough he made. His lungs felt like they wereon fire and his entire body trembled.

Rick slapped his forehead. “D-d-damn it, Morty! Y-you weren’tsupposed to take all of it! Now there isn’t enough for me! Do yoUUGH know howexpensive these crystals are a-a-at these parties? Now I have to get thema-a-at three times the going rate from my dealer!”

Morty didn’t hear him. The sclera of his eyes turned blue,the K-Lax hitting him like a hammer to the head. The eye-searing strobe lightsthat swept over the stadium seemed as beautiful to him as the aurora borealis. Themusic, instead of thumping loudly in his skull and giving him a migraine,cradled his ears like a soothing melody. The hellish party transformed into abeautiful landscape before Morty’s eyes.

The mass of living bodies that gyrated on the dance floorwas all too appealing to Morty.  Hisentire being was tingling with the urge to melt into the mass. He could fuckingdestroy that crowd. He could make them grovel at his feet. Those pussies. Theyhaven’t seen what real dancing is. He was going to part this mob like fuckingMoses and the red sea.

Morty’s mind raced with the delusions of a thousandscenarios. He could just imagine what he was going to do tonight. He felt so powerful. Like he was untouchable. Likehe could do anything. Proxinius-A was going to eat from the palm of his hand. Hewas going to make all the aliens here love him. And by God, they were going toscream out his name.

“W-w-wait, Morty, are you even listening to me?” Rick said,snapping two fingers in front of his face impatiently. “I-I said let’s go andget some more crystals. I-I don’t want you being the only one who’s having somefun around here.”

Who’s this boring oldman talking to me? Fucking loser. Morty’s answer was immediate.

“FUCK YOU, YOU OLD MAN. I WANT TO PARTY. GET YOUR FUCKINGCRYSTALS YOURSELF. MORTY’S IN THE HOUUUUUUUUSE!” the boy screamed. Hedisappeared into a nearby herd of Norsodonts, pushing aside the surprisedaliens uncaringly.

“Oh shit. Morty’soverdosed on—UURP—Kalaxian crystals!”

Morty awoke with a pounding headache and a dry taste in hismouth.

He felt like a corpse and his limbs were aching from overuse.Blinking away the sleep from his eyes, he slowly got up, fighting the pain thatcrawled up his legs. Once his vision cleared, no longer hazy and swarming withdots, he gaped at the sight that graced his eyes.

He had ended up passing out in a dingy two-bed motel roomwith six different aliens. There was one with six facial tentacles sleeping atthe foot of one bed, another one with ram horns curled up on the rubber mat outsideof the bathroom door, two with three arms and grey skin snoozing away in thecloset of all places, one that he recognized as a Glooptopian in same bed asthe tentacled one, and one with the thickest fur he’d seen on the floor. To hishorror, a lump under a blanket lay snoring away in the same bed he was sleepingin.

What the fuckhappened? I was at that party, and… oh no.

“Oh geez. Fuck. Fuck.” Morty clutched his hair. “I’m amoron.”

The lone occupant on the bed stirred, the lump turning intothe familiar shape of gangly limbs. The blanket was thrown off casually as theperson yawned.

“Morty, i-i-it’s too early to get up. Get back in here.”Rick mumbled, patting the pillow beside him.

“That-that’s all you’re going to say, Rick?” Morty said inhorror. “A-a-after everything that’s just happened last night? Do-do you evenrealize what happened between us? I won’t—I shouldn’t—I-I-I can’t even look atyou straight anymore!”

“Well, those are the side effects of overdosing on thoseKalaxian crystals, Morty, w-w-what do you expeUUGHt?” Rick sighed. “I don’tthink y-y-you should be worrying about that. I think you should be worried aboutthe fact that someone uploaded a-a-a video of you dancing the funky chicken tothe galactic Interweb. Y-y-you’re an interplanetary laughingstock, Morty.”

“That’s not worse than havingan orgy with—”

“Ugh God, again with the yapping. No one’s going toremember, Morty. No one’s going to care about this. This is literally businessas usual on Proxinius-A.” Rick shuffled in his seat, giving an expectant look tohis grandson. “Now stop fucking woOOUGHrrying about it. Y-y-you even did greatyesterday. Blew my mind. Now will y-y-you just get back in here?”

#Es answers #my writing #700 follower drabble bonanza #this was pretty unconventional! #niiiiiice #tw drug abuse #Rickmorty #kinda? It's implied lmao #I'm not entirely sure I'm satisfied with this

[keithgrosme]

Randazza: Section 2(a) Falls! First Amendment Wins!

Randazza: Section 2(a) Falls! First Amendment Wins!

He died for your sins. Today he spoke to us through the justices of the Federal Circuit

First Amendment Prevails as Final Portion of Trademark Act’s Censorship Regime Falls

by Marc J. Randazza

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just struck down the final pillar in the U.S. Trademark Act’s censorship regime.

15 U.S.C. § 1052(a) (known best as “Section 2(a)”) is a portion of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, that prevents registration of certain kinds of marks.  It used to bar registration of marks that “may disparage,” as well as marks that were “immoral or scandalous.”  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court in Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744 (2017) found that the bar on registration of marks that “may disparage” violated the First Amendment.  This decision got a lot of attention and caused much speculation as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” language of Section 2(a) would survive, since the two had so much in common.

In fact, the author of this Article did an in depth study of the issue in Freedom of Expression and Morality Based Impediments to the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. See also The USPTO Would Prefer Not to Follow the First Amendment, What's got “The Slants” case, CUMFIESTA, Fuckingmachines, Nutsacks, and Japanese porn?, and Decision on Asian American Band's Name is Wrong.

We no longer have to speculate as to how the courts might fuck this up — they didn't. Section 2(a)'s unconstitutional provisions have finally fallen, absent an appeal.  And, the final one fell on largely the same arguments I raised in 2006 in "The Fuck Brief."  Unfortunately, my client in that case elected to forego an appeal.  However, most of the arguments made it into the Amicus Brief filed by the First Amendment Lawyers' Association in the In Re Tam case.

Today, the Federal Circuit in In re: Brunetti, Case No. 2015-1109 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 15, 2017) found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction on registration is unconstitutional for largely the same reasons the “may disparage” restriction was.  The case started with the applicant, Brunetti, attempting to register the mark FUCT.  The USPTO found this mark to be synonymous with “fuck,” making it vulgar, and thus running afoul of Section 2(a).  The Federal Circuit affirmed that FUCT was immoral or scandalous, but then found that this portion of Section 2(a) was unconstitutional and thus could not prevent registration of the mark.

The Brunetti Decision

Background and Legal Issues

The Brunetti decision is heavily influenced by the Supreme Court’s Tam decision.  As in Tam, there was a question as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was viewpoint-based.  Such restrictions are almost always unconstitutional. The Brunetti court found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was likely viewpoint-based and failed to pass constitutional muster (Decision at 13.)

The Tam decision already effectively dispensed of some of the government’s potential arguments.[1]  The two arguments that the Brunetti court primarily considered not at issue in Tam were (1) the federal trademark registration scheme (specifically the principal register) is a limited public forum allowing for content-based restrictions on speech, and (2) the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) survived the lesser level of scrutiny for restrictions on commercial speech.[2]

The Federal Register Not Found to be a Limited Public Forum

Depending on the type of public forum, the government may restrict speech on the basis of content.  Traditional public forums, such as public sidewalks or parks, give the government the least leeway in restricting speech, while limited public forums, where the government only opens property for narrow uses by the public, allow for content-based restrictions.

The government argued that the principal register was similar to “metaphysical” limited public forums that courts have recognized in other cases, such as a university’s student fund or a workplace charity drive.  The Brunetti court found that these forums were connected to specific government property, and thus had no relation to the principal register or the federal trademark scheme; after all, a mark by definition is used in commerce and cannot be tied to specific government property.  (Decision at 24.)  The principal register is merely a government database, and accepting the government’s argument on this point would mean turning every government registration program, such as copyrights and marriage licenses, into limited public forums and allowing wide-ranging content-based discrimination by the government.  (Decision at 25.)

“Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Not Aimed at Commercial Aspect of Trademarks

The Brunetti court went on to reject the government’s argument that the “immoral or scandalous” prohibition of Section 2(a) was aimed at commercial speech.  The primary test for determining whether a mark is “immoral or scandalous” is if the general public would find the mark “shocking to the sense of truth, decency, or propriety; disgraceful; offensive; disreputable; . . . giving offense to the conscience or moral feelings; . . . or calling out for condemnation.”  In re Fox, 702 F.3d 633, 635 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The court noted that this restriction is aimed solely at the expressive content of trademarks, rather than their commercial source-identifying function, and necessarily involves moral value judgments.  (Decision at 27.)  The court could have stopped after this determination, since the government agreed that the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) could not survive strict scrutiny, but it went on to find that the restriction could not survive even intermediate scrutiny.

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Fails Even Intermediate Scrutiny

Intermediate scrutiny allows content-based restrictions on commercial speech if (1) the speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading; (2) the asserted government interest is substantial; (3) the regulation directly advances that government interest; and (4) the restriction is not more extensive than necessary to serve that interest.  See Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n, 447 U.S. 557, 566 (1980).

The court found that there was not a substantial government interest served by the “immoral or scandalous” restriction.  The only interests the government articulated was “protecting public order and morality,” and shielding trademark examiners from drawings of genitalia.  (Decision at 29-30.)  The court pointed out that Supreme Court precedent, including Tam, establishes that the government does not have a substantial interest in protecting the sensibilities of the public or preserving people’s feelings.[3]

Even if this were a substantial interest, the prohibition on registration of “immoral or scandalous” marks failed to advance it.  The court observed that the restriction does not prevent anyone from using such marks in commerce, and that “[i]n this electronic/Internet age, to the extent that the government seeks to protect the general population from scandalous material, with all due respect, it has completely failed.”  (Decision at 35.)

Finally, assuming that the other elements of the Central Hudson test were met, the court found that the “immoral or scandalous” standard was so vague and open to interpretation that it was unnecessarily expansive.  The court identified numerous marks that were registered in some cases and rejected in others with seemingly no consistent principles or standards.  (Decision at 35-37.)

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Language Could Not Be Narrowed

After finding that the “immoral or scandalous” bar cannot survive as it currently exists, the court looked to whether a narrower interpretation of its language would make it constitutional.  The concurring justices wanted narrowly to define “immoral or scandalous” as referring only to legally obscene content, but the court could not allow this because the restriction had a clear history of being applied to content that was not legally obscene or even sexual in nature, and no commonly used definition of “immoral or scandalous” is co-extensive with the legal definition of obscenity.  (Decision at 39-40.)

What This Means for Trademark Owners

Finally, after years of unconstitutional action by the USPTO, there is no longer a bar on the registration of “immoral or scandalous” trademarks.  Several applications for allegedly “immoral or scandalous” marks were suspended after the Federal Circuit’s decision in Tam, and the Brunetti decision should mean that these applications will now be able to proceed to registration.  This does not necessarily mean they will, however.  The USPTO may decide to appeal the Brunetti decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, and use that appeal as the basis for continuing to suspend these applications.  It may also use such an appeal as the basis for suspending any new trademark application that an examiner determines to be “immoral or scandalous.”  The government was the clear loser in the Brunetti decision, and I doubt it thinks it will fare any better on most issues with the Supreme Court.  It may, however, attempt to push hard on obtaining a narrower definition of the bar on appeal that does not invalidate it outright, but instead restricts it only to legally obscene trademarks.  This argument probably has the best chance of prevailing.

There is also the possibility that Congress, if it can be trusted to do anything in the current political climate, may introduce a new restriction to replace the “immoral or scandalous” bar.  The Brunetti decision strongly indicates that a bar on registration of legally obscene marks would be constitutional, but Congress may attempt to impose a somewhat broader restriction.  This is speculation for now, though, as there do not appear to be any rumblings from Washington about rewriting Section 2(a).

Brunetti does not necessarily create an automatic sea-change in the federal trademark registration regime.  We will need to see what the USPTO does in the short term in response to the decision.  If it allows previously “immoral or scandalous” marks to proceed to registration, then we should expect to see a flood of trademark applications for years' worth of a backlog of improperly-denied registrations.  If the USPTO keeps sitting on its hands, however, that rush will likely be delayed until the Supreme Court (if it takes the case) decides the issue.  However, should the Supreme Court decide to take this case up, it would be hard pressed to overrule this decision and keep the very recent precedent of In Re Tam intact.  I find it very unlikely that SCOTUS would be inclined to reverse precedent that it just recently established, unanimously at that.

[1] The government reiterated its argument that the federal trademark registration scheme is a government subsidy, meaning it can discriminate based on content.  While only a plurality of the Tam actually reached this issue, the Brunetti court found there was no indication from the other justices that this was a close call or that the Federal Circuit’s Tam decision on these issues was in any way wrong.  (Decision at 16.)

[2] The government conceded that the restriction could not survive “strict scrutiny,” the usual (and extremely difficult to satisfy) test for content-based restrictions on speech.  (Decision at 14.)

[3] The government tried to analogize this case to FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), which found that the government could restrict an afternoon broadcast of George Carlin’s rapid-fire recitation of “shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits” for the purpose of preserving the sensibilities of vulnerable children.  The Brunetti court dispensed of this by noting that registering a trademark does not foist the mark upon the nation’s youth, or even make them any more accessible.  (Decision at 34.)

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/15/randazza-section-2a-falls-first-amendment-wins/ via Blogger http://keithgros.blogspot.com/2017/12/randazza-section-2a-falls-first.html

[nancydhooper]

Randazza: Section 2(a) Falls! First Amendment Wins!

He died for your sins. Today he spoke to us through the justices of the Federal Circuit

First Amendment Prevails as Final Portion of Trademark Act’s Censorship Regime Falls

by Marc J. Randazza

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just struck down the final pillar in the U.S. Trademark Act’s censorship regime.

15 U.S.C. § 1052(a) (known best as “Section 2(a)”) is a portion of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, that prevents registration of certain kinds of marks.  It used to bar registration of marks that “may disparage,” as well as marks that were “immoral or scandalous.”  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court in Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744 (2017) found that the bar on registration of marks that “may disparage” violated the First Amendment.  This decision got a lot of attention and caused much speculation as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” language of Section 2(a) would survive, since the two had so much in common.

In fact, the author of this Article did an in depth study of the issue in Freedom of Expression and Morality Based Impediments to the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. See also The USPTO Would Prefer Not to Follow the First Amendment, What's got “The Slants” case, CUMFIESTA, Fuckingmachines, Nutsacks, and Japanese porn?, and Decision on Asian American Band's Name is Wrong.

We no longer have to speculate as to how the courts might fuck this up — they didn't. Section 2(a)'s unconstitutional provisions have finally fallen, absent an appeal.  And, the final one fell on largely the same arguments I raised in 2006 in "The Fuck Brief."  Unfortunately, my client in that case elected to forego an appeal.  However, most of the arguments made it into the Amicus Brief filed by the First Amendment Lawyers' Association in the In Re Tam case.

Today, the Federal Circuit in In re: Brunetti, Case No. 2015-1109 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 15, 2017) found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction on registration is unconstitutional for largely the same reasons the “may disparage” restriction was.  The case started with the applicant, Brunetti, attempting to register the mark FUCT.  The USPTO found this mark to be synonymous with “fuck,” making it vulgar, and thus running afoul of Section 2(a).  The Federal Circuit affirmed that FUCT was immoral or scandalous, but then found that this portion of Section 2(a) was unconstitutional and thus could not prevent registration of the mark.

The Brunetti Decision

Background and Legal Issues

The Brunetti decision is heavily influenced by the Supreme Court’s Tam decision.  As in Tam, there was a question as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was viewpoint-based.  Such restrictions are almost always unconstitutional. The Brunetti court found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was likely viewpoint-based and failed to pass constitutional muster (Decision at 13.)

The Tam decision already effectively dispensed of some of the government’s potential arguments.[1]  The two arguments that the Brunetti court primarily considered not at issue in Tam were (1) the federal trademark registration scheme (specifically the principal register) is a limited public forum allowing for content-based restrictions on speech, and (2) the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) survived the lesser level of scrutiny for restrictions on commercial speech.[2]

The Federal Register Not Found to be a Limited Public Forum

Depending on the type of public forum, the government may restrict speech on the basis of content.  Traditional public forums, such as public sidewalks or parks, give the government the least leeway in restricting speech, while limited public forums, where the government only opens property for narrow uses by the public, allow for content-based restrictions.

The government argued that the principal register was similar to “metaphysical” limited public forums that courts have recognized in other cases, such as a university’s student fund or a workplace charity drive.  The Brunetti court found that these forums were connected to specific government property, and thus had no relation to the principal register or the federal trademark scheme; after all, a mark by definition is used in commerce and cannot be tied to specific government property.  (Decision at 24.)  The principal register is merely a government database, and accepting the government’s argument on this point would mean turning every government registration program, such as copyrights and marriage licenses, into limited public forums and allowing wide-ranging content-based discrimination by the government.  (Decision at 25.)

“Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Not Aimed at Commercial Aspect of Trademarks

The Brunetti court went on to reject the government’s argument that the “immoral or scandalous” prohibition of Section 2(a) was aimed at commercial speech.  The primary test for determining whether a mark is “immoral or scandalous” is if the general public would find the mark “shocking to the sense of truth, decency, or propriety; disgraceful; offensive; disreputable; . . . giving offense to the conscience or moral feelings; . . . or calling out for condemnation.”  In re Fox, 702 F.3d 633, 635 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The court noted that this restriction is aimed solely at the expressive content of trademarks, rather than their commercial source-identifying function, and necessarily involves moral value judgments.  (Decision at 27.)  The court could have stopped after this determination, since the government agreed that the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) could not survive strict scrutiny, but it went on to find that the restriction could not survive even intermediate scrutiny.

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Fails Even Intermediate Scrutiny

Intermediate scrutiny allows content-based restrictions on commercial speech if (1) the speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading; (2) the asserted government interest is substantial; (3) the regulation directly advances that government interest; and (4) the restriction is not more extensive than necessary to serve that interest.  See Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n, 447 U.S. 557, 566 (1980).

The court found that there was not a substantial government interest served by the “immoral or scandalous” restriction.  The only interests the government articulated was “protecting public order and morality,” and shielding trademark examiners from drawings of genitalia.  (Decision at 29-30.)  The court pointed out that Supreme Court precedent, including Tam, establishes that the government does not have a substantial interest in protecting the sensibilities of the public or preserving people’s feelings.[3]

Even if this were a substantial interest, the prohibition on registration of “immoral or scandalous” marks failed to advance it.  The court observed that the restriction does not prevent anyone from using such marks in commerce, and that “[i]n this electronic/Internet age, to the extent that the government seeks to protect the general population from scandalous material, with all due respect, it has completely failed.”  (Decision at 35.)

Finally, assuming that the other elements of the Central Hudson test were met, the court found that the “immoral or scandalous” standard was so vague and open to interpretation that it was unnecessarily expansive.  The court identified numerous marks that were registered in some cases and rejected in others with seemingly no consistent principles or standards.  (Decision at 35-37.)

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Language Could Not Be Narrowed

After finding that the “immoral or scandalous” bar cannot survive as it currently exists, the court looked to whether a narrower interpretation of its language would make it constitutional.  The concurring justices wanted narrowly to define “immoral or scandalous” as referring only to legally obscene content, but the court could not allow this because the restriction had a clear history of being applied to content that was not legally obscene or even sexual in nature, and no commonly used definition of “immoral or scandalous” is co-extensive with the legal definition of obscenity.  (Decision at 39-40.)

What This Means for Trademark Owners

Finally, after years of unconstitutional action by the USPTO, there is no longer a bar on the registration of “immoral or scandalous” trademarks.  Several applications for allegedly “immoral or scandalous” marks were suspended after the Federal Circuit’s decision in Tam, and the Brunetti decision should mean that these applications will now be able to proceed to registration.  This does not necessarily mean they will, however.  The USPTO may decide to appeal the Brunetti decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, and use that appeal as the basis for continuing to suspend these applications.  It may also use such an appeal as the basis for suspending any new trademark application that an examiner determines to be “immoral or scandalous.”  The government was the clear loser in the Brunetti decision, and I doubt it thinks it will fare any better on most issues with the Supreme Court.  It may, however, attempt to push hard on obtaining a narrower definition of the bar on appeal that does not invalidate it outright, but instead restricts it only to legally obscene trademarks.  This argument probably has the best chance of prevailing.

There is also the possibility that Congress, if it can be trusted to do anything in the current political climate, may introduce a new restriction to replace the “immoral or scandalous” bar.  The Brunetti decision strongly indicates that a bar on registration of legally obscene marks would be constitutional, but Congress may attempt to impose a somewhat broader restriction.  This is speculation for now, though, as there do not appear to be any rumblings from Washington about rewriting Section 2(a).

Brunetti does not necessarily create an automatic sea-change in the federal trademark registration regime.  We will need to see what the USPTO does in the short term in response to the decision.  If it allows previously “immoral or scandalous” marks to proceed to registration, then we should expect to see a flood of trademark applications for years' worth of a backlog of improperly-denied registrations.  If the USPTO keeps sitting on its hands, however, that rush will likely be delayed until the Supreme Court (if it takes the case) decides the issue.  However, should the Supreme Court decide to take this case up, it would be hard pressed to overrule this decision and keep the very recent precedent of In Re Tam intact.  I find it very unlikely that SCOTUS would be inclined to reverse precedent that it just recently established, unanimously at that.

[1] The government reiterated its argument that the federal trademark registration scheme is a government subsidy, meaning it can discriminate based on content.  While only a plurality of the Tam actually reached this issue, the Brunetti court found there was no indication from the other justices that this was a close call or that the Federal Circuit’s Tam decision on these issues was in any way wrong.  (Decision at 16.)

[2] The government conceded that the restriction could not survive “strict scrutiny,” the usual (and extremely difficult to satisfy) test for content-based restrictions on speech.  (Decision at 14.)

[3] The government tried to analogize this case to FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), which found that the government could restrict an afternoon broadcast of George Carlin’s rapid-fire recitation of “shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits” for the purpose of preserving the sensibilities of vulnerable children.  The Brunetti court dispensed of this by noting that registering a trademark does not foist the mark upon the nation’s youth, or even make them any more accessible.  (Decision at 34.)

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/15/randazza-section-2a-falls-first-amendment-wins/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmullins]

Randazza: Section 2(a) Falls! First Amendment Wins!

He died for your sins. Today he spoke to us through the justices of the Federal Circuit

First Amendment Prevails as Final Portion of Trademark Act’s Censorship Regime Falls

by Marc J. Randazza

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just struck down the final pillar in the U.S. Trademark Act’s censorship regime.

15 U.S.C. § 1052(a) (known best as “Section 2(a)”) is a portion of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, that prevents registration of certain kinds of marks.  It used to bar registration of marks that “may disparage,” as well as marks that were “immoral or scandalous.”  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court in Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744 (2017) found that the bar on registration of marks that “may disparage” violated the First Amendment.  This decision got a lot of attention and caused much speculation as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” language of Section 2(a) would survive, since the two had so much in common.

In fact, the author of this Article did an in depth study of the issue in Freedom of Expression and Morality Based Impediments to the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. See also The USPTO Would Prefer Not to Follow the First Amendment, What's got “The Slants” case, CUMFIESTA, Fuckingmachines, Nutsacks, and Japanese porn?, and Decision on Asian American Band's Name is Wrong.

We no longer have to speculate as to how the courts might fuck this up — they didn't. Section 2(a)'s unconstitutional provisions have finally fallen, absent an appeal.  And, the final one fell on largely the same arguments I raised in 2006 in "The Fuck Brief."  Unfortunately, my client in that case elected to forego an appeal.  However, most of the arguments made it into the Amicus Brief filed by the First Amendment Lawyers' Association in the In Re Tam case.

Today, the Federal Circuit in In re: Brunetti, Case No. 2015-1109 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 15, 2017) found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction on registration is unconstitutional for largely the same reasons the “may disparage” restriction was.  The case started with the applicant, Brunetti, attempting to register the mark FUCT.  The USPTO found this mark to be synonymous with “fuck,” making it vulgar, and thus running afoul of Section 2(a).  The Federal Circuit affirmed that FUCT was immoral or scandalous, but then found that this portion of Section 2(a) was unconstitutional and thus could not prevent registration of the mark.

The Brunetti Decision

Background and Legal Issues

The Brunetti decision is heavily influenced by the Supreme Court’s Tam decision.  As in Tam, there was a question as to whether the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was viewpoint-based.  Such restrictions are almost always unconstitutional. The Brunetti court found that the “immoral or scandalous” restriction was likely viewpoint-based and failed to pass constitutional muster (Decision at 13.)

The Tam decision already effectively dispensed of some of the government’s potential arguments.[1]  The two arguments that the Brunetti court primarily considered not at issue in Tam were (1) the federal trademark registration scheme (specifically the principal register) is a limited public forum allowing for content-based restrictions on speech, and (2) the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) survived the lesser level of scrutiny for restrictions on commercial speech.[2]

The Federal Register Not Found to be a Limited Public Forum

Depending on the type of public forum, the government may restrict speech on the basis of content.  Traditional public forums, such as public sidewalks or parks, give the government the least leeway in restricting speech, while limited public forums, where the government only opens property for narrow uses by the public, allow for content-based restrictions.

The government argued that the principal register was similar to “metaphysical” limited public forums that courts have recognized in other cases, such as a university’s student fund or a workplace charity drive.  The Brunetti court found that these forums were connected to specific government property, and thus had no relation to the principal register or the federal trademark scheme; after all, a mark by definition is used in commerce and cannot be tied to specific government property.  (Decision at 24.)  The principal register is merely a government database, and accepting the government’s argument on this point would mean turning every government registration program, such as copyrights and marriage licenses, into limited public forums and allowing wide-ranging content-based discrimination by the government.  (Decision at 25.)

“Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Not Aimed at Commercial Aspect of Trademarks

The Brunetti court went on to reject the government’s argument that the “immoral or scandalous” prohibition of Section 2(a) was aimed at commercial speech.  The primary test for determining whether a mark is “immoral or scandalous” is if the general public would find the mark “shocking to the sense of truth, decency, or propriety; disgraceful; offensive; disreputable; . . . giving offense to the conscience or moral feelings; . . . or calling out for condemnation.”  In re Fox, 702 F.3d 633, 635 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The court noted that this restriction is aimed solely at the expressive content of trademarks, rather than their commercial source-identifying function, and necessarily involves moral value judgments.  (Decision at 27.)  The court could have stopped after this determination, since the government agreed that the “immoral or scandalous” portion of Section 2(a) could not survive strict scrutiny, but it went on to find that the restriction could not survive even intermediate scrutiny.

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Bar Fails Even Intermediate Scrutiny

Intermediate scrutiny allows content-based restrictions on commercial speech if (1) the speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading; (2) the asserted government interest is substantial; (3) the regulation directly advances that government interest; and (4) the restriction is not more extensive than necessary to serve that interest.  See Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n, 447 U.S. 557, 566 (1980).

The court found that there was not a substantial government interest served by the “immoral or scandalous” restriction.  The only interests the government articulated was “protecting public order and morality,” and shielding trademark examiners from drawings of genitalia.  (Decision at 29-30.)  The court pointed out that Supreme Court precedent, including Tam, establishes that the government does not have a substantial interest in protecting the sensibilities of the public or preserving people’s feelings.[3]

Even if this were a substantial interest, the prohibition on registration of “immoral or scandalous” marks failed to advance it.  The court observed that the restriction does not prevent anyone from using such marks in commerce, and that “[i]n this electronic/Internet age, to the extent that the government seeks to protect the general population from scandalous material, with all due respect, it has completely failed.”  (Decision at 35.)

Finally, assuming that the other elements of the Central Hudson test were met, the court found that the “immoral or scandalous” standard was so vague and open to interpretation that it was unnecessarily expansive.  The court identified numerous marks that were registered in some cases and rejected in others with seemingly no consistent principles or standards.  (Decision at 35-37.)

The “Immoral or Scandalous” Language Could Not Be Narrowed

After finding that the “immoral or scandalous” bar cannot survive as it currently exists, the court looked to whether a narrower interpretation of its language would make it constitutional.  The concurring justices wanted narrowly to define “immoral or scandalous” as referring only to legally obscene content, but the court could not allow this because the restriction had a clear history of being applied to content that was not legally obscene or even sexual in nature, and no commonly used definition of “immoral or scandalous” is co-extensive with the legal definition of obscenity.  (Decision at 39-40.)

What This Means for Trademark Owners

Finally, after years of unconstitutional action by the USPTO, there is no longer a bar on the registration of “immoral or scandalous” trademarks.  Several applications for allegedly “immoral or scandalous” marks were suspended after the Federal Circuit’s decision in Tam, and the Brunetti decision should mean that these applications will now be able to proceed to registration.  This does not necessarily mean they will, however.  The USPTO may decide to appeal the Brunetti decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, and use that appeal as the basis for continuing to suspend these applications.  It may also use such an appeal as the basis for suspending any new trademark application that an examiner determines to be “immoral or scandalous.”  The government was the clear loser in the Brunetti decision, and I doubt it thinks it will fare any better on most issues with the Supreme Court.  It may, however, attempt to push hard on obtaining a narrower definition of the bar on appeal that does not invalidate it outright, but instead restricts it only to legally obscene trademarks.  This argument probably has the best chance of prevailing.

There is also the possibility that Congress, if it can be trusted to do anything in the current political climate, may introduce a new restriction to replace the “immoral or scandalous” bar.  The Brunetti decision strongly indicates that a bar on registration of legally obscene marks would be constitutional, but Congress may attempt to impose a somewhat broader restriction.  This is speculation for now, though, as there do not appear to be any rumblings from Washington about rewriting Section 2(a).

Brunetti does not necessarily create an automatic sea-change in the federal trademark registration regime.  We will need to see what the USPTO does in the short term in response to the decision.  If it allows previously “immoral or scandalous” marks to proceed to registration, then we should expect to see a flood of trademark applications for years' worth of a backlog of improperly-denied registrations.  If the USPTO keeps sitting on its hands, however, that rush will likely be delayed until the Supreme Court (if it takes the case) decides the issue.  However, should the Supreme Court decide to take this case up, it would be hard pressed to overrule this decision and keep the very recent precedent of In Re Tam intact.  I find it very unlikely that SCOTUS would be inclined to reverse precedent that it just recently established, unanimously at that.

[1] The government reiterated its argument that the federal trademark registration scheme is a government subsidy, meaning it can discriminate based on content.  While only a plurality of the Tam actually reached this issue, the Brunetti court found there was no indication from the other justices that this was a close call or that the Federal Circuit’s Tam decision on these issues was in any way wrong.  (Decision at 16.)

[2] The government conceded that the restriction could not survive “strict scrutiny,” the usual (and extremely difficult to satisfy) test for content-based restrictions on speech.  (Decision at 14.)

[3] The government tried to analogize this case to FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), which found that the government could restrict an afternoon broadcast of George Carlin’s rapid-fire recitation of “shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits” for the purpose of preserving the sensibilities of vulnerable children.  The Brunetti court dispensed of this by noting that registering a trademark does not foist the mark upon the nation’s youth, or even make them any more accessible.  (Decision at 34.)

Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author.

[bigskydreaming]

You will never catch me saying a single positive thing about some ‘progressive move’ Marvel editorial makes in an X-Men comic until every single decision maker of the past ten years is out of those offices.

Individual writers, yes. Editorial, the ones handing down the creative mandates? Hell no.

This means Northstar and Kyle’s wedding, Bobby, Rictor and Shatterstar’s outings, Storm’s solo series, etc, etc.

Because Marvel editorial does not actually give a single fuck about any of the messages embodied by the X-Franchise, and spent the last ten years proving it.

Marvel as a company was happy to profit off the X-Men movies after they sold the rights to save themselves from bankruptcy. But from the second Iron Man became a success and the movies they churned out featuring characters they still had all the rights to started making profits they got to keep fully, they actively torpedoed the X-Men franchise both in the comics and outside of them. Because now the X-Men were technically competition, at least in the arena of movies, which is where the real money was being made.

Like, it seriously pains me to remember how HUGE X-Men fandom was in the eighties, nineties and early 2000s. Across the comics, various cartoons and the movies, X-Men was one of THE biggest fandoms, back when the fandom juggernauts of today like SPN, HP and the like were still wee baby fandoms. 

And Marvel actively, deliberately killed it. Because they didn’t want people focusing on X-Men characters and reading X-Men stories and buying X-Men action figures instead of Avengers ones. It’s why they made no effort to resolve the issues blocking Wolverine & the X-Men from getting a second season. Even though the first season got ratings that more than justified a followup that would be guaranteed to be profitable for them. And why there hasn’t been another X-Men cartoon since. Even though Marvel always held the rights to make more cartoons while Fox held the movie rights.

It’s why Marvel editorial set out to do House of M and Decimation...those storylines aimed at essentially ending the possibility of new mutant characters were created specifically to do that. They literally did not want new mutant characters that might end up being breakout hits that fans wanted more of in place of more Iron Man, Captain America or Avengers-related properties like Young Avengers. Quesada, the EIC at the time, said it was because writers were getting too lazy with their origin stories as long as they had the concept of mutants to fall back on. All they had to do with a new character was say ‘oh they’re a mutant’ instead of coming up with a unique angle for where they got their powers.

Except then Marvel turned around and reconfigured Inhumans into the new mutants, tweaking their decades old concept to make it so suddenly there was no limit to how many new Inhumans could be created, unlike the limit they’d imposed on new mutant characters. And suddenly you had dozens of new characters with electricity powers and flight and super strength and shapeshifting and who looked no different in any meaningful way from any new mutant character introduced ten, fifteen years prior...except now, all of those dozens of new characters ‘unique angle for where they got their powers’ was oh, they’re Inhumans instead of oh they’re mutants. 

And it wasn’t even like Marvel made Inhumans the new mutants because they had active, important plans to incorporate their concept into their live action universe....again, it LITERALLY was done simply to make the X-Men franchise less necessary. They pushed the Inhumans movie back year by year by year until finally scrapping it altogether, and put barely any effort into the TV show they made of it instead. The only evidence of Inhumans in the MCU is still just in Agents of SHIELD, the show they barely do any promo for and honestly don’t care all that much about. The Inhumans’ sole purpose over the past ten years has basically just been to be an alternative to mutants, should anyone want one....not even BECAUSE the MCU actually wanted one.

And then you had shitty events like Avengers vs X-Men where it was never in question that it was going to be at the X-Franchise’s expense. And in the aftermath of that, they claimed to be making a big push to incorporate the X-Men more into the Marvel universe, do stories showing that the other heroes cared about mutant issues.....all by folding the X-Men into Avengers titles. Books like Uncanny Avengers were launched, with X-Men on lineups with Avengers and calling themselves Avengers....but no new X-books were launched with Avengers in their stories. Because that was never the point. The point was that it basically got X-readers who didn’t give a shit about Avengers comics to pick up Avenger titles in order to read about Storm and Rogue and other favorites....without marketing having to acknowledge the X-brand label in any actual way. Literally just to use X-characters to sell Avengers books, without actually doing anything for the X-franchise.

Not to mention the way the X-franchise’s direction has dramatically shifted every one, two years over the past decade, with no clear oversight or shepherding of it....because it basically became the place for writers to do whatever the hell they wanted, because Marvel as a company DID NOT CARE what happened with the X-books. All the terribly thought out storylines to appear in X-titles of the last decade happened because pretty much any pet project a writer Marvel valued wanted to try out got the green light for them to do in the X-books, because they didn’t have anything they wanted out of the X-brand, other than for it to not siphon fans away from their preferred properties. So you had things going one way one year and then pull a complete 180 the next year when a hot new writer at Marvel wanted to do something completely different. 

Not to mention the way Marvel’s consistently funneled their low-selling writers into writing X-books, except for when high profile writers wanted on an X-title. The X-books became a testing ground for new and unproven writers, which occasionally did result in some good stories, yes, but I don’t really think Marvel deserves props for the efforts of those writers when they only got to do those stories because Marvel didn’t actually care. 

And the most obnoxious thing about all of this is....they were still making money off the X-Men the whole time. From their comics, from repeated viewings of their older cartoons, from toy sales, etc. The X-Men have continued to turn a profit for Marvel even as Marvel actively drove them into the ground....because as long as it wasn’t ever going to be AS MUCH profit as Marvel could make off the movies of characters they had all the rights to....they didn’t want the X-Men ever even potentially overshadowing the Avengers in current readers’ eyes.

So it honestly pains me to see Marvel given any credit whatsoever for various progressive moves they’ve made with X-characters over the past decade. Because while all companies are in it to make money and I don’t expect otherwise, I can’t think of any other occasion where I’ve so clearly watched a company spit on one of its most profitable and iconic properties and all its fans, for the crime of....making money. They literally crashed and burned the franchise with full knowledge of what they were doing, and actively drove away one of the biggest fandoms out there, turning it into a wasteland compared to what it was, because the well established success and visibility of the X-franchise and fandom was in their eyes a threat to the MCU franchise and fandom they were trying to cultivate instead.

And given that on a meta level, the X-Franchise has always appealed more than most to readers from marginalized communities because of the allegories inherent in its core concept....its honestly kinda insulting whenever I’d see mainstream headlines and news stories giving Marvel editorial kudos for a high-profile gay wedding or making a founding X-Man gay or other well-received moves over the last decade....knowing full well how little regard they actually have for the readers those moves mean so much to, given that pretty much every other decision they make around it is meant to keep the X-Franchise from overtaking the Avengers in popularity again.

Like, don’t get me wrong because Bobby Drake has been one of my three favorite superheroes of all time for most of my life, in part BECAUSE I always read him as gay or bi.....so I love love LOVE that he’s officially a mlm in canon and has gotten his own solo series. But at the same time, its obnoxious as hell to be aware that people have been speculating about his sexuality for decades and making references in canon even, and outing him only actually happened BECAUSE he’s an X-character. You notice that for all the positive praise Northstar’s wedding and Bobby’s coming out garnered Marvel, they haven’t been in any rush to make a high profile Avenger gay, have they? Like....yes, the X-franchise has always been the franchise to make social commentary in, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only reason big creative alterations like making one of the oldest Marvel characters gay was only happening in the franchise Marvel didn’t give a fuck about.

So it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the comics now that the X-Men movie rights are back with Marvel and under the Disney umbrella. And I do hope and think that means the comic books will start to get a more cohesive direction again with the X-Men taking more pivotal roles in the comics and getting higher profile treatment again.

But fuck ever giving any of the current Marvel editorial staff credit or recognition for any progressive stories in the X-books. Because they very much do not care about the concept of the X-Men or the messages the X-Franchise is capable of sending with its stories. You can’t dedicate ten years to actively minimizing the franchise that means so much to marginalized readers and still claim to actually give a crap about any of the representation that franchise provides for those readers. Like, lol, you just can’t. 

#long post